The Great Experiment: race and authorship in Shonda Rhimes’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story

Abstract

In 2023, Shonda Rhimes’s Queen Charlotte premiered on Netflix. The series is a prequel to the streamer’s hit series, Bridgerton (2020–present), itself an adaptation of Julia Quinn’s popular series of romance books. In Bridgerton’s colour-conscious British Regency setting, the marriage of Queen Charlotte, who is Black, and King George, who is white, led to the racial integration of elite society. Queen Charlotte, written and produced by Rhimes, gives the context for their love story. Although Rhimes is known for the diversity of her television shows, this series represents her most sustained engagement with issues of race. It is also her most personal work. The story of young Charlotte reflects Rhimes’s own, as a Black woman who rose to power within a white-dominant institution. Queen Charlotte understands race not primarily as identity or culture, but as a tool used by institutions to distribute power. While Bridgerton preserves the optimistic attitude of the romance novels, Queen Charlotte ends with more ambivalence, reflecting both the sincerity of its concerns and the sensibility of its creator.

As Shonda Rhimes watched the actress Golda Rosheuvel play the role of Queen Charlotte, mercurial fairy godmother to the central couple in Bridgerton (2020), she felt inspired. Rhimes saw a world of drama within a woman who makes mischief because, despite her privileges, she lives a very restricted life. As Rhimes explained to Gabrielle Collins on Bridgerton: The Official Podcast, ‘I now live in a world where I don’t need to ask anybody’s permission to do what I want to do. And I’m really fascinated by the constraints placed on women… who did have to ask permission’ (Collins, ‘Envisioning a Queen’). In that interview, Rhimes was primarily referencing the differences between women’s lives in the eighteenth-century past and the twenty-first-century present; however, she could also have been describing the differences between Shonda Rhimes the showrunner of Grey’s Anatomy and Shonda Rhimes the head of a multi-million-dollar production company ensconced within the world’s number one streaming company. With a breakout hit under her belt, Shondaland’s production head had as much autonomy as any showrunner working in television. With this freedom, she chose to develop a series about the Bridgerton character who fascinated her. The result was a coming-of-age story with undeniable echoes of Rhimes’s own ascent through the television industry: A woman comes into position of power within a storied institution, learns to fulfil a new role with substantial responsibilities, and finds herself responsible not only for herself but for the progress of all people of colour.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (2023) is a prequel spin-off of Bridgerton, which developed into one of Netflix’s signature franchises soon after its premiere: Three additional seasons and a spin-off series were greenlit within the six months following.¹ Each season of Bridgerton adapts one of the novels of the popular romance series by Julia Quinn, who wrote a love story for each of the eight siblings of a family living in Regency Britain. Season 1 (2020) follows the courtship of Daphne Bridgerton and Simon Basset (Quinn’s The Duke and I (2000)), Season 2 (2022) follows Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma (The Viscount Who Loved Me (2000)), and Season 3 (2024) follows Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington (Romancing Mister Bridgerton (2002)). The character of Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, did not appear in Quinn’s books, but was added to the narrative world during the process of adapting the novels to the screen. In that process, the creators also took advantage of a historiographic debate. Some British historians have argued that Queen Charlotte was Black, a claim based on the known ‘Moorish’ ancestry of her antecedents (Jeffries). In the alternate history proposed by Bridgerton, the love between the Black queen and the white king prompted the integration of the British ‘ton’, resulting in a racially diverse aristocracy.

Queen Charlotte (2023) elaborates the story of this supporting character. The series alternates between two timelines: In the earlier timeline, young Charlotte is recruited from her small European province to marry King George of Great Britain. George and Charlotte fall in love, and Charlotte grows into her role as wife and monarch. The second timeline takes place between Seasons 2 and 3 of the main series, in what the scripts call ‘Bridgerton present time’ (BPT). In BPT, Queen Charlotte prods her children to produce an heir and continue the royal line. The series extends two storylines from the main series: Young Lady Agatha Danbury, the leader of the ‘ton’ in Bridgerton, agitates to secure the hereditary rights of ‘the Great Experiment’ in racial integration; and Violet Bridgerton, the mother of the eight siblings, is presented as a sparky young woman who struggles, in BPT, with solitary widowhood.

While Rhimes has always attracted a great deal of attention as a Black female showrunner, Queen Charlotte represents Rhimes’s most sustained engagement with issues of race. As Rhimes built racially diverse ensembles across network television, her shows inspired continuous conversation around the showrunner, the stories she chose to tell, and television’s racial politics. A number of scholars, including Amy Long, Kristen Warner, and Emma Lynn, have analysed the implications of Rhimes’s use of ‘colour-blind’ and ‘colour-conscious’ casting and sought to uncover the ways in which the shows’ on-screen diversity has reflected—or possibly advocated for—‘postracial’ ideologies. In Queen Charlotte, Rhimes elaborates on a theme in her work that scholars have generally missed: For Rhimes, race is about power. This theme, explored within the narrative framework provided by the series’ genre, both upholds and challenges the expectations of the popular romance novel. Looking closely at Rhimes’s deceptively complicated love story offers an opportunity to expand scholarly conversations around authorship, race, and representation.

‘It’s Shonda Rhimes’ world’

Adaptation studies, long interested in the relationship between novels and cinema, have benefitted from literature and film’s overlapping, single-authorship modes of critical analysis—auteurism posited, as Jean-Luc Godard claimed, that the director is ‘always alone; on a set as before the blank page’ (Godard 76). Television, with its long-running series and rotating production personnel, has historically challenged, or been excluded from, auteurist media analysis. The rise of prestige television in the early 2000s, and the emergence of the showrunner as an authorial figure, brought new interest to questions of authorship in television. As Newman and Levine write, ‘The showrunner is potentially an auteur: an artist of unique vision whose experiences and personality are expressed through storytelling craft, and whose presence in cultural discourses functions to produce authority for the forms with which he is identified’ (Newman and Levine 38). The ascendancy of this new figure allowed for a new critical discourse in which television—formerly a degraded, commercial, cultural form—became a site of artistic self-expression.

At the same time, even prestige productions continue to remind us that authorship must always be contextualized. Bridgerton is an example of a prestige series that is multiply authored. While it is common for popular sources, and indeed some scholarly sources, to describe the show as ‘Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton’, Rhimes served as executive producer, not showrunner—that role was filled by Chris Van Dusen, who had previously worked on several Shondaland productions. The narrative world, as well as the main narrative line, was the invention of Julia Quinn, who built out the Bridgerton family and community over eight books and related book series. In adapting The Duke and I for Season 1, Van Dusen and his writing team reimagined some key characters and expanded the couple-centric story into a sprawling ensemble more suitable for serial storytelling. The directors of the early episodes, including Julie Ann Robinson and Tom Verica, along with the production designers and post-production teams, put Netflix’s money on the screen, creating the series’ spectacularly rich mise-en-scène. The first season, and the seasons that followed, show the work of many skilled hands.

Queen Charlotte, a six-episode series, is more self-contained and more thoroughly controlled by a single vision, expressed in both story and style. Rhimes, who is generally circumspect in interviews, told Maureen Lee Lenker of Entertainment Weekly, ‘I felt a personal attachment to this queen and to her story, and I really enjoyed telling it’. Even such a muted confession was an unusually public disclosure for Rhimes. When asked by Lenker to ‘elaborate on that personal attachment’, Rhimes diverted immediately to the less personal plural: ‘We had a lot of talks about it—the idea of bringing in a queen and the idea of making her a woman of color was very much at the forefront of our discussions. We all knew that that’s what we wanted to do’ (Lenker; emphasis added). While Queen Charlotte certainly was a ‘we’ endeavour in some ways—there was a cast and a crew and even a co-writer—the ‘we’ is appropriately royal. With Queen Charlotte, Rhimes stepped fully into the showrunner role: She created the story, she directly oversaw production, and she was the sole credited writer on four of the six episodes.²

Rhimes wrote a series with characters who reflected her own experiences, as a woman of ambition who was compelled by circumstance to develop leadership capacities that she lacked and to fulfil responsibilities that she did not choose. This was, in part, what it meant to be a ‘showrunner’ in the early 2000s, when writers took on—or were saddled with—the responsibilities of producing, as well as the responsibilities of representing their show to the world. Writers like David Chase (The Sopranos, 1999–2007), David Simon (The Wire, 2002–08), and Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (Lost, 2004–10) were profiled not only in the trade papers in which they would have previously expected to appear, but also in mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines, on daytime and late-night talk shows, and in newer formats like blogs and podcasts.

Shonda Rhimes first became known to audiences as the creator of Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present) broadcast on ABC, which made an immediate impression as a medical drama of unusual audacity and featured one of the most racially diverse casts on television. Following the success of Grey, Rhimes’s production company, Shondaland, developed Scandal (2012–18), the hit political drama on which Rhimes served as showrunner. Shondaland continues to develop more series, on which Rhimes was executive producer: the legal drama How to Get Away with Murder (2014–20); the Grey’s spin-offs Private Practice (2007–13) and Station 19 (2017–24); and half a dozen other series.

Even as Rhimes enjoyed unprecedented success, she was constrained by her institutional position. By 2017, her shows were estimated to have made 2 billion dollars for the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC; and Rhimes felt overworked, creatively depleted, and under-appreciated. Eventually, it came time to part ways. As Rhimes told Lacey Rose of The Hollywood Reporter, the straw that broke the camel’s back in her increasingly strained relationship with Disney/ABC was a back-and-forth exchange about an all-access pass to Disneyland. While the pass had been intended for Rhimes’s exclusive use, she asked for special access for her sister, who was going to accompany Rhimes’s daughters to the park. Permission was eventually granted, but on the day of the trip, her sister’s pass did not work, and Rhimes called Disney for help. The executive replied (‘allegedly’, Rose writes, carefully), ‘Don’t you have enough?’ It was an insult. And Rhimes decided that she had had enough (Rose).

Soon after, Shondaland had a new home at Netflix. Rhimes was clear with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos about what she wanted: ‘I just want to be in a place where I can make stuff and no one’s going to bother me or make me feel like I’m beholden’ (Rose). Rhimes negotiated a deal worth an estimated 150 million dollars, and that came with significant autonomy—true to Sarandos’s word, Netflix waited patiently for Shondaland’s first productions, which were released three years later. The first was a dance documentary featuring longtime collaborator Debbie Allen. The other was Bridgerton.

The preceding summary of Rhimes’s professional arc omitted the ways in which her experience was shaped by her intersecting identities, though her identity as a Black woman was never omitted from any profile or interview as she rose to the top of the television heap. As Rhimes developed hit after hit, she also managed pressures specific to her position as a Black woman in what had recently become a public facing role. And as someone who cast her shows ‘diversely’, Rhimes was constantly asked to account for the existence of people of colour on her shows, as well as to address the underlying question of how her racial and gender identity shaped her work. Rhimes developed strategies to address the latter. When asked by Oprah, ‘Did you set out to elevate the country’s consciousness in terms of racial diversity?’, Rhimes replied: ‘I just wanted a world that looked like the one I know’. Ralina Joseph describes Rhimes’s deployment of such utterances as examples of ‘strategic ambiguity’—a tactic used by Black women like Rhimes, Oprah Winfrey, and Michelle Obama, who are ‘simultaneously powerful and disempowered’ (Joseph 16). In Rhimes’s case, Joseph argues, her ‘responses both predicted and warded off journalistic assumptions that a Black woman showrunner was going to be myopically driven by race and race alone’ (Joseph 91). Rhimes dissembled, and the critical conversations continued without her.

Mainstream media outlets have tended to celebrate the diversity on Rhimes’s shows, while scholars have been more ambivalent or negative, situating Rhimes’s casting and storytelling practices within ideologies of colour-blindness and post-racism that erase the realities of continuing oppression. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy largely avoid direct discussions of race and racism, are reluctant to depict the social worlds of their marginalized characters, and avoid depicting the culture and history of those characters. As Stephanie L. Young and Vincent Pham argue, this approach results in ‘obscuring racism, reproducing white privilege, and reinforcing postracialism… despite the visibility of people of color’ (Young and Pham 141). In their analysis of Shondaland’s How to Get Away with Murder, Emiel Martens and Débora Póvoa make the case that ‘the series’ naturalisation of racial egalitarianism among the main characters ultimately endorses the idea of the United States as a postracial society’ (Martens and Póvoa 123). Maryann Erigha argues that ‘crossover’ shows like Rhimes’s choose not to place the viewer inside the communities and contexts from which their characters come. About Scandal, she writes, ‘Despite having black characters in prominent positions, Scandal maintains an intimate proximity to white characters and audiences… and provides many avenues to escape identification with blackness and black womanhood’ (Erigha 12). Particularly in relation to Scandal, which featured US television’s first Black female lead since Teresa Graves’s short run in Get Christie Love (1974–75), many critics, as well as ordinary viewers, found themselves divided within themselves. As Mia Mask wrote, ‘Even in communities of colour, folks are not certain whether Rhimes’ Scandal is a progressive step in an anti-essentialist direction or a regressive move backward’ (Mask 4).

As Rhimes’s body of work has grown, critics have seen Rhimes’s work evolve, as well. Jade Petermon and Ralina Joseph have observed shifts in racial discourse, both within Rhimes’s shows and from Rhimes herself (Joseph 96–103; Petermon 115–16). As Rhimes has become more powerful within the industry and secured more creative freedom as a showrunner, she has spoken more freely about race and racism. Changes in the media environment have contributed. Social media, especially Twitter, gave Rhimes a platform to speak directly to viewers. Rhimes in 2004 was ambiguous about race in the national press; a decade later, she tweeted directly to more than a million followers about an episode of Scandal inspired by the Ferguson uprising. It’s not clear whether Rhimes was impacted personally by the shifts in the political landscape caused by the emergence of Black Lives Matter, or whether Rhimes’s stronger position within the industry made it more possible for her to absorb any backlash to any public position she might take—though the most likely answer is ‘both’.

Rhimes quit Twitter in 2022, but she continues to maintain a social media presence on Instagram. In 2024, between publicity for her shows, Rhimes’s personal account (separate from Shondaland’s account) includes posts in support of Amnesty International, campaigns against banned books, and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Her politics—broadly centre-left—are suggested, and there are no recent examples of race-based advocacy. Though Rhimes is more open with her views than she was when her television career began, she continues to be, in public, consummately professional, largely impersonal, and selectively political.

First, Only, Different

Upon its release, the first season of Bridgerton reanimated the conversation about race and representation that had accompanied Rhimes since the premiere of Grey’s Anatomy. Bridgerton’s approach to creating a new representational schema for historical storytelling disappointed viewers who had hoped that a ‘colour-conscious’ reinterpretation of the Regency would involve historical consciousness, as well. Critics objected to the shallowness—or, to use Kristen Warner’s term, ‘plasticity’—of the on-screen characterizations (Warner, ‘In the Time of Plastic Representation’). As Warner herself argued in The Cut, Bridgerton’s approach lacked texture. She wrote, ‘The show has positioned itself as a kind of representational Switzerland—neither shying away from the fact that its characters of color are visibly different from their white counterparts, nor bringing to bear the ways in which their racial difference has historical implications’ (Warner, ‘Bridgerton Hasn’t Solved Its Diversity Problem’). Other critics were troubled by the implications of this positioning. Amanda Prescott was discomfited by the casting of a Black actor as the lead in Season 1, in the context of a storyline that involved sexual assault. Prescott found ‘uncomfortable echoes of White women in history using rape to justify racial violence against Black men’ (Prescott 67). P.K. Posti argues that ‘the romance script and the casting of Bridgerton intersect in a way that reinforces a “new racism,” in which narratives that seemingly challenge racism end up reinscribing it’ (Posti 134).

While ‘colour-blind’ and ‘colour-conscious’ casting were developed to evade rather than engage with the complex realities of race, Queen Charlotte reflects a particular consciousness about how race works. This consciousness is not present in Bridgerton; it is Rhimes’s own contribution. In Queen Charlotte, race is a construct embedded within institutional and social structures, more than it is an identity category or set of cultural practices. This way of understanding race resonates with Rhimes’s public statements. When reporters ask Rhimes about her identity, she often sounds exhausted by the question. As she told journalist Willa Paskin during the run of Scandal, ‘I’m a black woman every day, and I’m not confused about that. I’m not worried about that. I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman’ (Paskin). Rhimes does not say that her race and gender do not shape her experience, but rather that those identities do not disempower her, which is her experience. The Disney executive’s suggestion that their most valuable showrunner should be grateful for the company’s largesse—don’t you have enough?—was an attempt to disempower, tinged with misogynoir. And it was stunningly ineffective, as the result was Rhimes’s departure for a position in which she was more empowered.

To ‘not feel disempowered’ is not the same as having no insight into the functioning of broader racialized and gendered systems. Queen Charlotte reflects a clear interest in how race shapes institutions, and how individuals navigate racialized institutions. Its approach to race is a departure from most mainstream narrative fiction. A narrative ‘about race’, especially a historical one, is usually constructed through the staging of racist encounters. These moments do appear in Queen Charlotte, but they are rare. Such a scene appears in Episode 1, in which young Charlotte arrives in Britain and is inspected by King George’s mother, Princess Augusta. As Charlotte stands alone in the centre of a room in the palace, Princess Augusta examines her teeth, hands, and hips, treating Charlotte like a slave at auction. The moment is striking, but it does not reflect an idea that is sustained across the series. The other explicitly racist encounter appears in Episode 5, in a scene in which Charlotte sits for a portrait commissioned by Princess Augusta. Charlotte sees her complexion in the portrait and commands the painter, ‘Paint my skin darker, as it actually is’. Princess Augusta intervenes, insisting that the portraitist paint Charlotte even lighter. This moment, while also striking, also does not represent a sustained argument about how race shaped Charlotte’s experience. Rather, the scene makes a quick historiographic intervention, suggesting a path through which the real Queen Charlotte’s blackness might have disappeared from the historical record.

Rather than focusing on racism as expressed through interpersonal interactions, Queen Charlotte takes a more sociological view. In Howard Winant and Michael Omi’s foundational text, Racial Formation in the United States, the authors write that racism ‘is not merely a matter of explicit beliefs or attitudes—significations or identities, in our vocabulary—but also and necessarily involves the production and maintenance of social structures of domination’ (Omi and Winant 129). Queen Charlotte is interested in how race functions within these structures. Race is necessarily enacted by people, but individual characters in Queen Charlotte find that they are engaging in power struggles, not identity conflicts. The marriage of Charlotte and George and the attendant plan to integrate the aristocracy is called ‘the Great Experiment’ in the series; Winant and Omi would call this development a ‘racial project’—an ‘effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines’ (Omi and Winant 125). Placing a protagonist within an explicit racial project, Queen Charlotte constructs Charlotte’s arc from naive princess to powerful queen by illustrating her encounters with institutional power.

Queen Charlotte’s interest in presenting an individual’s navigation through a racialized power structure is made evident when one compares the wedding sequences in the three Bridgerton seasons with the wedding sequence in Queen Charlotte. In the main series, each wedding is part of the romance plot, and the wedding offers an important insight into the relationship of the central couple. In Season 1, Simon and Daphne enter into a forced marriage, and the wedding scene in Episode 5 is filled with close-ups and two-shots that reveal the depths of their unease. In Season 2, Anthony nearly marries Kate’s sister; their wedding scene (Episode 6) is focalized through Anthony, whose point of view controls the scene—we see him look anxiously between the sisters, and then enter into a hallucination in which he marries Kate. In Season 3, the wedding takes place in Episode 7, in the middle of a simmering conflict between Colin and Penelope; as in Season 1, close-ups predominate. Couples at the altar and in the pews smile warmly at one another, and the scene confirms for the audience that the two lovers will work things out.

Queen Charlotte’s wedding is different. The wedding between Charlotte and George takes place near the end of the first episode, in a scene that directly follows the couple’s first meeting. The wedding scene communicates little about the central relationship, but much about the world Charlotte is entering. In the first moments of the scene, we see Charlotte enter through the back of the room in a deep, wide shot, then a cut to her point of view—a shaky pan, right then left—a wary look down the aisle. Charlotte is intimidated not by her groom, whom at first she can hardly see across the distance, but by the rigid lines of white aristocrats that mark out her path (Figs 1 and 2). In the Bridgerton weddings, guests are arranged in horizontal church pews; Charlotte walks through a gauntlet of suspicion. A few newly elevated Black aristocrats are sprinkled within the crowd, but the overall impression is that of a young Black woman facing down rigid, white power.

Charlotte’s objective, as expressed in this sequence, is to learn how to take her place at the top of this power structure, and how to keep it. Rhimes expressed part of her interest in Charlotte in this way: ‘This woman is trapped in a job that she can’t quit’ (Collins, ‘Reflecting on the Magic’). That is, Rhimes sees the royalty and the aristocracy not merely as social contexts but as workplaces. Moreover, they are workplaces in which women do the work. This view of the Georgian era—a world run by women—was established in the main series. As historian Amy Froide discusses, while patriarchy provides cultural context, society is not governed by men: The world of Bridgerton ‘does not focus on male monarchs; rather it is a matriarchy with mothers and aunts duelling [sic] to marry off their progeny and with a Queen at its social apex’ (Froide 56–7). Charlotte, lost at the end of the first episode of the season, has to find her way: to loving George, to leading her subjects, to ‘securing the line’ through her children (and, in BPT, through her children’s children).

Charlotte’s experience as she learns the rules—and learns to rule—within a Georgian aristocracy-workplace is strongly reminiscent of Rhimes’s navigation of the television industry. In her book, The Year of Yes (2015), Rhimes describes her experience as an ‘F.O.D.’, a term that she coined:

I am what I have come to call an F.O.D.—a First. Only. Different…. We know one another on sight. We all have that same weary look in our eyes. The one that wishes people would stop thinking it remarkable that we can be great at what we do while black, while Asian, while a woman, while Latino, while gay, while a paraplegic, while deaf. But when you are an F.O.D., you are saddled with that burden of extra responsibility—whether you want it or not (Rhimes 139).

For Rhimes, being an F.O.D. is not about the embodied experience of being Black, female, or both at once. What she emphasizes instead is what it is like when the broader culture—including those who have the power to saddle another person with extra responsibility—sees you through that lens. Being an F.O.D. is not an identity as much as it is a social position that is subject to certain restrictions and compels certain behaviours. Rhimes describes some of the truisms that accompany this position: ‘You don’t get second chances’, ‘You have to be twice as good to get half as much’ (Rhimes 139–40). Rhimes also describes the consequences of making the most out of that first chance, which was the accrual of a volume of stress that endangered her health. In Queen Charlotte, the consequences of being racialized are expressed tonally; the series captures racial melancholy in unexpected ways.

Aloneness and loneliess

In Queen Charlotte, the price paid for being an F.O.D. is perpetual loneliness. Rhimes does not write about being lonely in The Year of Yes, though she does, in other sources, profess that loneliness is a prominent theme in her work. As she told Maureen Lee Lenker, ‘Literally every, every show I’ve ever written is about people’s fear of being alone in some way, or people trying to find someone so they’re not alone’ (Lenker). Even as Queen Charlotte is built around a central love story, the melancholy of loneliness suffuses the series: the loneliness of being separated from her family and the place she was raised, of being widowed by mental illness within her marriage, and of being the only one of her kind.

Throughout the series, the mise-en-scène communicates Charlotte’s aloneness, and presents her aloneness as the result of quiet but persistent institutional oppression. Most of the series is staged in interiors—inside carriages, bedrooms, parlours, a royal observatory. We do not get the scenes of characters strolling around parks and horse races that appear in Bridgerton; when Charlotte takes a walk, it is on the palace grounds, which we know she cannot leave.

These settings moreover feel incommodious. They are opulent, in accordance with Bridgerton’s sumptuous visual style, but Queen Charlotte’s luxury is nowhere near as warm. In the main series, the characters comfortably inhabit luxurious spaces—the Bridgerton family arranges themselves in congenial conversation groups in their parlour, the aristocratic crowds fill roomy ballrooms with dancing and conversation (Fig. 3). Queen Charlotte, in contrast, is a series of ornate interiors that feel empty, save for the hovering darkness. Deep space compositions leave the main characters looking like they have been swallowed by their environment, even as the backgrounds are strewn with a handful of staff (Fig. 4). Charlotte’s discomfiture is evident, as we see her alone in the middle of rooms surrounded by the trappings of royal power. When she is not in rooms and halls that overwhelm her, Charlotte is caught in hallways, trapped visually within the corridors of power (Figs 5 and 6). In Bridgerton, by contrast, characters are seldom alone—characters are continually creating and resolving conflicts with each other, in community. In Queen Charlotte, Charlotte is often either alone or accompanied by her factotum (who reports on her activities to the royal family). That is, she is always framed within, and accompanied by, architectures of power. We are continually reminded of her context, of the power relations that construct the system that she has been dropped into—and, often, how alone she is within it, as the one who is First, Only, and Different.

While colour-blind casting often leads to minority characters existing in isolation, colour-conscious Queen Charlotte offers Charlotte a friend—though this crucial relationship is an alliance as much as a friendship. Queen Charlotte’s friend-ally is Lady Agatha Danbury, who in Bridgerton is a leader of society and mediates between the queen and the aristocracy. In Queen Charlotte, Agatha is an instinctual political creature, both a friend to Charlotte as well as a woman seeking advantage within the same system of white dominance. The audience meets young Agatha in the first episode; she is among the smattering of Black faces amongst the crowd at the wedding. Close-ups on Agatha show her taking in the situation—she sees the new Black queen walking nervously down the aisle and whispers to herself, ‘The pieces fall into place’ (Fig. 7). Rhimes understood the relationship between the two as one in which Agatha ‘sees an opportunity’. Rhimes also describes Agatha’s subsequent overture to Charlotte as a ‘woman of colour moment’—a genuine offer of support from a woman who understands the personal difficulties of Charlotte’s position as well as the potential political consequences of Charlotte’s naïveté (Collins, ‘Envisioning a Queen’).

It is through Agatha that Queen Charlotte is most explicit about the burden of responsibility placed on an F.O.D. within a racialized power structure. In Episode 5, after Lord Danbury has passed away, Agatha is visited by a group of newly elevated aristocrats. Danbury’s death has raised the question of heredity, and Agatha’s close friendship with the queen has given her access that others are depending on her to use. An aristocrat explains to her, ‘We need to know whether the laws of succession on their side apply to our side’. The blocking in this scene has Agatha standing alone, as she faces a room of her peers (Fig. 8). It is hard not to see, in that chorus of faces of colour staring at this F.O.D. with unusual access to power, a visual distillation of twenty years’ worth of expectant audiences calling on Rhimes to do her duty, as they saw it, to ‘our side’. Agatha’s choice reflects Rhimes’s own expressed sense of responsibility to those whose side she was on. As Rhimes wrote in The Year of Yes, ‘I never wanted to have to look at myself in the mirror and say that I didn’t try as hard as I could to make these shows work. That I didn’t give 100 percent to leave a legacy for my daughters and for all the young women of color out there who wondered what was possible’ (Rhimes 140).

In Rhimes’s story, the path was paved by persistence. Rhimes said of her younger self, aware of the previously quoted truism about working twice as hard: ‘I didn’t want half. I wanted it all. And so I worked four times as hard’ (Rhimes 140). Agatha, too, gets to work. She enters a battle of wills with George’s mother, Princess Augusta, who pressures Agatha to spy on Charlotte, while Agatha presses Augusta on the question of inheritance. In the final episode, during a meeting with Princess Augusta, Agatha breaks down. Princess Augusta is horrified. A brief moment of interracial sorority follows. Augusta tells Agatha of her life with her father-in-law, the king. ‘A cruel, evil man’, Augusta says. ‘The bruises. There were no other options. I endured’. She tells Agatha that she must find her own strength: ‘You are not allowed to come here and sob. You may not quit. Cover your bruises and endure’. Rhimes describes this scene as ‘one of my favourite scenes that I’ve written’. Says Rhimes, ‘I was raised by a Princess Augusta, in the best possible way’, suggesting that the older woman’s directive is not just for Agatha, but for everyone—and certainly for anyone whom the system seeks to disempower. The main series, like the novels from which they were adapted, demonstrates the freedom that emotional vulnerability and honesty can offer. Queen Charlotte—and Rhimes herself—advises the construction of a steely armour, for an F.O.D. to protect themselves in the battles they must fight alone.

Happiness and ever after

As a spin-off of an adaptation of a romance novel, the series was also invested in the battles that individuals choose to fight together. The source genre for both Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte is the literary genre of the popular romance, in which a courtship structures the narrative. The courtship is never smooth, of course—there must be barriers. As Pamela Regis writes, barriers can be external to the characters (class differences or geographic distance) or internal (pride or prejudice) (Regis 32–3). When the central couple is interracial or otherwise from different backgrounds, the clash of cultures often creates the barriers within the love story. Historical realities, of course, pose many challenges to romance authors seeking to write optimistic cross-cultural love stories set in the past, and interracial romances have tended to be contemporary. In choosing to adapt a historical romance set in the British Regency era, the creators of Bridgerton had only few models for interracial relationships, and fewer models for the type of broad, diverse representation that is a Shondaland signature.

At the same time, historical romance novels offered many models for stories of women fighting their way toward happiness, which is also a Shondaland signature. Most writers of Regency-set historical romances trace back to the twentieth-century novels of Georgette Heyer, who established a formula for historical romance that influenced subsequent generations. As Hsu-Ming Teo and Paloma Fresno-Calleja write, Heyer ‘single-handedly created a costume-rich world of balls, country house retreats and other exclusive social events frequented by the aristocratic London ton [fashionable society] and governed by rigid rules of propriety’ (Teo and Fresno-Calleja 1). While Heyer was interested in period detail, her heroines, as Pamela Regis explains, are modern, not historical: they seek out compassionate marriages, they have some measure of financial autonomy, and they have authority over themselves in a time in which ‘parental authority governed a girl’s behavior’ (Regis 128–9). For Heyer, the essential ‘fact’ of the period is that it was a time of constraint of women’s autonomy. That historical fact, once established, allowed her to write stories about women who wrestled with the problems of their own time.

Many who followed Heyer focused more on story than history. Teo and Fresno-Calleja write that novelists like Johanna Lindsey, who published Regency bestsellers beginning in the 1980s, ‘eschewed historical research and appeared instead to rely on other historical romance novels they had read’. The historical past presented in romance novels from the last quarter of the twentieth century is, more often than not, ‘purely intertextual’ (Teo and Fresno-Calleja 13). The purely intertextual Regency has a limited set of characters and concerns. Heroes and heroines come from a leisure class in which their primary activity is courtship, and there is little variation within in any of the major identity categories: class (elite), race (white), gender (cis), sexuality (hetero), age (young). The sub-genre has expanded somewhat in recent years, as a growing number of authors challenge readers’ expectations as to what romance set in the Regency and its adjacent periods can contain; but Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books are among those that take the Heyer-invented Regency setting for granted. Quinn earned her reputation through characterization and dialogue, not setting; her witty and affectionate Bridgerton family exists in a historical past created entirely by pre-existing genre conventions, in which there was only whiteness.

Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte solved the difficulties of representing race in the historical romance by extending the genre’s creative treatment of history. Just as Heyer had used historical details to create a ‘modern’ Regency of her own making, so did the Shondaland team. In Queen Charlotte’s invented history, racial dynamics are also invented. As argued previously, race exists institutionally and its effects are felt and fought individually: Charlotte feels the loneliness of her isolation due to her institutional subject position, and Agatha is engaged in a political battle for resources. Race is not primarily about identity or culture, and it is not negotiated interpersonally. Although both George and Charlotte are essential players in the racial project of the series, race-based conflict is kept out of their courtship.

Removing race from their dynamic, ironically, makes it more difficult for the series to deliver on the genre’s promises. As Pamela Regis writes: ‘Romance novels end happily. Readers insist on it. The happy ending is the one formal feature of the romance novel that virtually everyone can identify’ (Regis 9). Had Rhimes made racial reconciliation the desired outcome, the integrated social world of Bridgerton would have provided the necessarily validation for the success of the Great Experiment. Instead, Rhimes chose a barrier that is irresolvable: George’s illness. The series is not explicit about what disease or condition ails him, though the audience sees him fight tremors and experience hallucinations. Rhimes has George articulate his internal experience to Charlotte, touchingly: ‘In my mind… the heavens and the earth collide, I do not know where I am’. (Charlotte responds, also touchingly, ‘I will stand with you between the heavens and the earth. I will tell you where you are’.) Once George’s illness is foregrounded, Queen Charlotte cannot deliver a straightforward ‘happily ever after’, as viewers had seen in the main series that George was often unstable and Charlotte was often unhappy.

This deviation from genre expectations highlights Rhimes’s authorial voice. In each Bridgerton series, the happy ending is delivered as expected. At the close of Season 1, the lovers reconcile and welcome a child. In Season 2, the central couple returns joyfully from an extended honeymoon. Season 3 concludes with another reconciliation and another child. Queen Charlotte instead ends in emotional compromise. The affecting closing sequence takes place in BPT, as the older Charlotte rushes to tell her husband important news—a grandchild is expected, the line has been secured. Charlotte finds George unwell, sketching nonsense on the bedroom wall. In an echo of an earlier scene, Charlotte invites George under the bed, a place of safety for them. The series ends at floor height, as Charlotte tells George, ‘Your line will live on’. George corrects her: ‘Our line’. In an exchange of close shots, Charlotte and George, young and old, embrace and exchange loving glances, existing together, for a moment, in the space between the heavens and the earth. Viewers understand that Charlotte’s happiness comes in moments, not in a steady state of ‘ever after’.

Within the worldview of Shonda Rhimes, however, the series does not end unhappily. In Queen Charlotte, a young woman learns to navigate a system that does not seek to accommodate her, despite how badly it needs her. As she does, she finds the joys of life there: love, purpose, autonomy, respect. ‘No fairy tales’, Rhimes declares near the conclusion of Year of Yes. ‘Be your own narrator’ (Rhimes 286). For Rhimes, having control over one’s life’s path is the happiest possible ending, and it is the ending she gives to Charlotte. When the series opens, Charlotte smashes a sculpted bust in anger after discovering that her brother has signed her life away to a foreign kingdom. At the series end, Charlotte occupies not only the apex of an institutional hierarchy, but she also occupies a few inches of happiness under a bed. If it is a life of highs and lows, of unbearable boredom and urgent responsibility, of deep connection and painful loneliness, it is, in the end, a life to which Charlotte has said, ‘yes’.

Conclusion

Queen Charlotte currently stands apart from Bridgerton, a self-contained authorial expression distinct from the main series in its tone, concerns, structure, and style. The third season, which started filming a few months after Queen Charlotte began, integrates some narrative content from the prequel while retaining Bridgerton’s overall lightness and avoiding the disruptions of racial politics. Story information from Queen Charlotte is integrated primarily into Lady Agatha Danbury’s storyline. Season 3 introduces audiences to Agatha’s brother, Lord Marcus, and the series hints that buried family history has caused strain between the siblings. In one scene, Marcus calls his sister ‘Soma’, and Agatha’s English takes on a different accent as she objects to the intimacy: ‘You think you can call me by my born name and right the wrong?’ Viewers of Queen Charlotte, who know that Agatha was raised in Sierra Leone, infer that she speaks to her brother in the accent they shared as children. This eruption marks the moment in the series in which the history introduced in the prequel is poised to shift the racial dynamics of the main series—but the moment passes.

There is more Bridgerton to come, and future seasons and series may go in other directions. Rhimes has said that she wants to adapt all eight books. ‘There are eight Bridgerton siblings’, she told Variety, ‘and as far as I’m concerned, there are eight “Bridgerton” seasons. And maybe more’ (Aurthur). Rhimes has also left the door open regarding additional prequel series. ‘I think Violet is fascinating’, she said during the Queen Charlotte press junket, ‘and there’s a story to be told there’ (IMDb). If Rhimes chooses to continue to expand the Bridgerton universe, Shondaland will have plenty more source material to use, as desired. Julia Quinn wrote a short story about the Bridgerton matriarch (‘Violet in Bloom’, 2013), and she has published more than a dozen novels over the last twenty years, including books that follow the romantic travails of an earlier generation of Bridgertons.

As for Shonda Rhimes, whichever paths she takes as a writer, producer, and head of Shondaland, will likely be those of her own choosing, at least for rh. In 2021, the deal she signed with Netflix was extended through 2026 and expanded to include ‘film, games, VR [virtual reality], branding and merchandising, live events and experiences’ (Goldberg). In 2024, the ratings performance of Bridgerton Season 3—2 billion minutes viewed in its first week, and one of Netflix’s most-watched series of all time two months after its premiere (Porter)—suggests that Rhimes will continue to enjoy the freedom that she moved to Netflix in order to secure. Scholars and critics can expect that Shondaland’s productions will continue to offer us new texts with which to consider not only the politics of colour-blind and colour-conscious casting, but also the narrative logics of racial projects and racialized institutions. As we continue to use Rhimes’s work to think about authorship, race, and representation, we might find that Rhimes will never represent anyone but herself. Like the heroine of her most personal story, she is alone at the top.

Footnotes

Works Cited