'Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story' Takes the Romance Back to Form
When Bridgerton originally premiered during the holiday season of 2020, it was a bit of a radical piece of television. TV mega-producer Shonda Rhimes took the classic Regency romance novel, and instead of bowdlerizing it the way "Women's Television" romances on Lifetime and Hallmark Channel might, she put the sex on the screen. This may not seem like a big deal; however, in a patriarchal society where women's desires are shamed and romance novels are deemed "trashy," celebrating what makes them great in a prestige-level, big-budget, ultra-marketed TV series was nothing less than revolutionary.
Lady Danbury: Lady Whistledown never writes of our hearts. We are untold stories.
That was not even considering the show's casting, where Rhimes threw out any assumptions of a white upper-class British aristocracy, casting her Regency fantasy as she saw fit, creating a vision of 19th-century racial harmony. Her excuse — stated in what was, unfortunately, one of the show's less convincing moments — was that King George III and Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz were an interracial couple in love. Instead of everyone pretending Charlotte was white, their union changed the world for the better.
