“Bridgerton” was a smash for Netflix when it premiered last year, and Season 2 of the historical romance, based on author Julia Quinn’s book series, has once again swept viewers up in its semi-winking Regency-era evocation of heaving breasts and smoldering stares, set against a backdrop of ballrooms and country estates.
This time out, Kate Sharma (the practical-minded elder sister, played by Simone Ashley) and Edwina Sharma (the sweetly naive younger sister, played by Charithra Chandran) have arrived in England from India with the intent of finding Edwina a husband. All goes to plan, except the most eligible bachelor of the season (Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton) happens to have eyes for Kate instead. The queen, a frequent presence in their lives, has thoughts about all of it. Let the swoonery commence. Ashley, in particular (whose previous credits include “Sex Education”), is such a great romantic lead, giving an emotionally grounded and witty performance. She’s beautiful and smart, desirable and relatable.
Hollywood rarely casts South Asian women with darker skin in these kinds of roles and “Bridgerton” is an exuberant but firm rebuke to that. It feels meaningful. So much so that it’s part of the show’s marketing campaign: “If you’re going to have a genre that’s all about love and happy endings,” Quinn told the streamer’s in-house publication, “then let everybody see themselves in the story. Part of the reason (the Netflix series) is so popular is because so many different kinds of people could see themselves in the story.”
Sounds good, right?
Well, get out your umbrellas because I’ve come to rain on the parade. Here’s how that can also sound: Now you, too, can watch someone who looks like you fall in love with and marry someone whose fortune likely comes from some nasty, nasty sources that involve the exploitation of people who also look like you.
The show doesn’t want to contend with that. It’s intentionally not built for it and the early 19th century version of England we see on screen seemingly never took part in, let alone profited from, the slave trade or the colonization of India.
And yet “Bridgerton’s” stories revolve around an elevated class of people — including the royal family — who derived their riches in real life by these very means. The Indian economist Utsa Patnaik estimates that Great Britain drained $45 trillion from India over a 200-year period. Industrialists don’t get a pass either; they were exploiting their own workers (children among them) and often indirectly profiting from the colonies as well.
“Bridgerton” pretends that cognitive dissonance doesn’t exist. That viewers do not want it to exist. I, on the other hand, can’t stop thinking about it. (The Broadway musical “Hamilton,” based on events closer to home, does something similar with its approach to casting and there have been critiques of it along these lines as well.)
Oh, lighten up, I hear you saying! And I get it. I really do. By the same token, I think we’re able to think about TV and film critically while also enjoying it. I wrote about some of these complexities when “Bridgerton” premiered last year and my feelings remain unchanged. It’s OK to like the show, and it doesn’t mean you’re giving a free pass to the horrors of British imperialism. People can make that distinction and hold two competing ideas in their heads at once. We do it all the time.
So far, “Bridgerton’s” success hasn’t led to a wave of announcements from streamers or TV networks that they intend to adapt historical romances from authors of color. That feels conspicuous. “Bridgerton” alone shouldn’t have to shoulder the variety of audience expectations. On the plus side, HBO Max is developing a TV series based on the true story of Jeremiah Hamilton, a Haitian immigrant and Wall Street tycoon in the 1800s who became one of the first Black millionaires. Separately, I’ve always thought Seneca Village, an enclave of prosperous Black property-owners in early 19th century New York City (a thriving community before residents were forcibly displaced in the late 1850s to make way for Central Park), would be a unique and worthy setting for a TV series or film. There’s no reason it couldn’t be a romance like “Bridgerton”; same time period, different continent, and perhaps a more intriguing place to explore new fictional stories.
But there’s something about Regency England that has people in its thrall. Maybe it’s because “Britain kept its legal discrimination at a sufficient distance from the mother country, so that the practice was unseen and, therefore, somehow not registered,” as Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, noted recently. I think that might be key to all of this, and I wonder if a show like “Bridgerton” would be as popular were it transposed across the pond and forward a couple decades to America’s antebellum period — a swirl of plantations and Southern belles, minus any acknowledgment of whose labor made it all possible. I mean, I basically just described your typical wedding that takes place on those grounds today.
I’m not saying “Bridgerton” needs to depict racism or the oppression of people of color. Seriously: No. That defeats the purpose of the show altogether. It can and should be frothy and fun. There’s value in that kind of entertainment. Life is hard, why shouldn’t we indulge in something escapist? But that’s probably why I would prefer to see shows like this set in a distinct alternate universe of garden parties and courtly manners that has no resemblance to any historical reality. Instead of the hazy nod here and there — from orchestral pop songs to costumes that aren’t entirely accurate — suggesting this isn’t exactly true to life, why not go all in and create a world untethered to reality altogether? That’s what “Game of Thrones” did, and whatever my critiques of the show, that wasn’t one of them.
There’s another Regency-era series that also just launched its second season. That would be Masterpiece’s “Sanditon” on PBS, which adheres more closely to a genre of shows I refer to as: “But What Will People Think!” (See also: “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey.”) “Sanditon” does not dodge some of these aforementioned questions. Doesn’t mean it always handles them well, either.
Based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, the protagonist is a young woman who spends time broadening her horizons in a burgeoning seaside resort town. In the first season, sparks fly between her and a man who also happens to be the guardian of another young woman, a Black biracial heiress who has just arrived from Antigua named Georgiana Lambe (played by Crystal Clarke). A wealthy and obnoxious local dowager named Lady Denham (Anne Reid) decides to hold a luncheon in Miss Lambe’s honor.
“What are your views on matrimony?” Lady D asks her guest, mid-bite, while they’re seated at the table. “An heiress with $100,000 must be in want of a husband, I’d think.”
Miss Lambe: “I don’t care to be any man’s property.”
Lady Denham: “Hoity toity! I should have thought someone like you would be quite used to being a man’s property — was not your mother a slave?”
Wow. There’s a long, awkward pause. Finally Miss Lambe replies: “She was. But being used to a thing and liking it were not the same.”
Check and mate. The show makes clear that Miss Lambe has the moral triumph, only to undercut it later when a character says of Lady Denham: “I think she means no real harm.” It becomes clear the white people at the party were uncomfortable not because Denham is racist but impolite.
Imagine if “Sanditon” were about Georgiana Lambe herself, front and center. That’s not how Austen wrote it, and that’s not how the show has adapted the story, either. And so she remains a side character worthy of more development. It gets worse as the season progresses, when the only other significant Black character — her secret fiance in London — accrues gambling debts and more or less sells her to a brothel owner, and her white friends come to the rescue, literally as her white saviors. I mean, when you have barely any Black characters in your show, maybe there are other ways to write that story?
The second season sees Miss Lambe urging those around her to abstain from putting sugar in their tea as a protest against the sugar plantations in the colonies, and you feel like, well, at least the show is trying. But we never learn more about the details behind Miss Lambe’s fortune and whether there’s still a plantation in Antigua being run in her name, or if she’s divested herself of that.There’s a whole story there I wish the show was interested in. It’s thorny!
The new seasons of “Bridgerton” and “Sanditon” arrived during the recent and disastrous royal tour of Caribbean Commonwealth countries by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, aka William and Kate. “The managed decline of empire has been accompanied by a managed orderly denial of what the empire was and did,” University of Manchester’s Young wrote.
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah put it this way: “Maybe it’s good for the world to see the British monarchy for the symbolic mess that it is, an outdated relic of imperialism.”
“Bridgerton” is working extra hard to pretend otherwise. It’s a pretty fascinating disconnect. Back in reality, nations such as Jamaica and Belize no longer want to play along.
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(Nina Metz is a Chicago Tribune critic.)
