I’m faintly shamed by my love for Netflix’s Bridgerton, because I usually ignore television drama in which everyone wears lilac. It is based on a series of silly “Regency Romance” novels by Julia Quinn, only one of which I’ve read (for this piece). They have names like The Viscount Who Loved Me or Romancing Mister Bridgerton and they tell the love stories of eight British siblings: the Bridgertons. Their parents named them after the letters of the alphabet, which is just lazy. They wear a lot of lilac. I know why. (I guessed). Their father, Viscount Edmund Bridgerton (Rupert Evans), loved lilacs – until he was killed by a bee, anyway. (Netflix PR copy writers don’t really care about forms of address. There is no Viscount Edmund Bridgerton. He is Viscount Bridgerton or Edmund Bridgerton). The entire second season can be read as a discourse on apiphobia.
It is conservative, being romance fiction, whose essential command is – if you don’t have, or want, a patriarch, invent one as an avatar, or toy. This genre is a system of feminine control, and much closer to crime fiction, its twin, than it pretends. It’s about coping, and gilding. Bridgerton, which first appeared on screens in 2020, promised to radicalise romance, but it didn’t. Much of the early chatter about the show, which is the fourth most popular show in Netflix’s history, was about race. The presiding Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) – usually referred to as THE QUEEN! or MY QUEEN! in shouty caps – is a woman of colour. When she arrives in Britain to marry George III (James Fleet), the crown ennobles local families of colour, which is, to be fair, the sort of thing the royal family would do if they found themselves biracial in error. Bridgerton calls this The Great Experiment: the hero of the first season is a black duke called Simon (Regé-Jean Page) who hates his father. This is the sort of negotiation the British elite excels at: incremental change to emphasize, not dilute, its power.
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