Alternative histories are fun, but only when they are somewhat plausible. Several episodes in, however, it is sprung on us in a dialogue between Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) and the young duke (both of whom are black) that everyone is actually highly conscious of race while feigning not to be - viewers have to make yet another adjustment, since we are apparently now in an alternative history of the UK, in which King George III married Charlotte, a black princess from the royal family of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in Germany (long story, drawing on crackpot 20th-century theories - just go with it).Īnyway, King George marrying a black queen caused the English, in this parallel Netflix timeline, to overflow with such love for darker-skinned Englanders that they started handing them lavish dukedoms and the like - while apparently still being hidden racists. They will feign an attachment to keep designing women away from him and to increase Daphne’s desirability with other men. Simon wishes, for dark family reasons, never to marry, and she wishes to marry well.
A scheme is thus concocted between her and Simon, the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page). Her older brother, however, blocks each potential match, since he knows the dirty secrets of every interested bachelor through his network of clubbable young gentlemen. When being presented to Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), she makes a stellar impression and is off to a running start. The eponymous fatherless family is opulently wealthy, and the story centers around eldest daughter Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), whose burden it is to get the family off to a good start in the aristocratic marital sweepstakes through which fortunes are merged and social statuses rise. One knows from the previews that it will be awful, but curiosity lures - just how awful? With its ballroom gowns and handsomely clad gentlemen, Bridgerton is superficially tailored for the sort of viewer who likes that sort of thing, and the Regency-era setting in Bath evokes pleasant memories of Jane Austen and classic productions of Persuasion. Case in point: Bridgerton, now on Netflix. Sometimes a television series can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up - or whether it wants to grow up at all.
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