Queen of Netflix: Streaming Shondaland

Abstract

In 2017, Netflix announced that it had entered into an exclusive multi-year development deal with award-winning American producer and writer Shonda Rhimes. Under this deal, all of Rhimes’s future productions (made under her company Shondaland) would be Netflix Originals. This article examines Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte to consider how the traditional period drama has been transformed, in this case through colour-blind and colour-conscious casting, and a focus on strong female leads of colour and interracial relationships. The article will consider more broadly how streaming services like Netflix are taking diversity seriously as a key to reaching contemporary global audiences.

Introduction

In a much-publicised multi-million-dollar deal with Netflix in August 2017, Shonda Rhimes agreed to move her production company Shondaland to the streaming service after nearly 15 years with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Under this deal, all future productions would be Netflix Originals. Rhimes cited her reasons for the move as ‘having more creative freedom’ and being able to ‘put something out … that can be [instantaneously] available all over the world’ (Wallerstein, 2017). She noted a chance to work in a variety of genres and formats beyond the scope of broadcast TV, and to produce limited or recurring series of varied episode lengths: ‘There is no broadcast standard and practices or length requirements. I can make something that is an hour and a half and I can make something that is 15 minutes long. There’s no “we want to see more of this because that’s what you’ve done before.” It’s an open road’ (N’Duka, 2017). Journalist Josef Adalian notes ‘Rhimes didn’t just leave ABC. She left network TV’, describing network TV as ‘the least attractive medium in which to work’ for a showrunner like Rhimes (2017). These statements invite contemplation on the question of what Rhimes can do on a streaming service like Netflix that she cannot or has not previously done with her ground-breaking shows on network television. And relatedly, what can Netflix do with Rhimes’s programmes that network television cannot in terms of extending and challenging the female-led television that Rhimes has become synonymous with?

Rhimes has achieved extraordinary success in the past 15 years with her long-running series such as Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present), Private Practice (2007–13), Scandal (2012–18), and How to Get Away with Murder (2014–20). She has given television unforgettable strong, black female characters, who are also vulnerable and fallible, like Grey’s Anatomy’s Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), Scandal’s Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), and How to Get Away with Murder’s Annalise Keating (Viola Davis). As Ralina L. Joseph (2016: 303) notes, ‘Rhimes’s success has belied television executives’ oft-whispered reasoning that audiences only want to see African American characters on sitcoms, and it has helped usher in a new era of “diversity” on television’. ¹

Indeed, Rhimes has redefined roles for women, and in particular black women, with her long-running and hugely successful series on network television. She notes:

We created a brand and an audience for ABC that they did not necessarily have before, which was a certain kind of woman … I literally remember when we started, them saying that no woman is going to watch a woman who is this ‘not nice’ and this sexually active and this competitive. I really hate the phrase ‘smart, strong women’, but the ‘smart, strong women’ thing really exploded with the shows we made. (Koblin, 2018)

Rhimes’s Netflix partnership offers to extend these roles even further for contemporary audiences, and to bring debates about race relations to a global audience. Rhimes has said that she has two main goals for her time at Netflix: one is to devise shows that are more expansive than the ones she produced for ABC; the other is to turn Shondaland into an enduring company that will live within Netflix in the same way that Marvel exists inside the Walt Disney Company (Adalian, 2021). In her Netflix slate, commencing with Bridgerton (2020–), Rhimes has reprised the figure of the ‘strong, smart woman’ that is a hallmark of her productions.

Rhimes’s move from network television to streaming provides an apposite moment to consider how her engagement with issues of race has also shifted. As Rachel Alicia Griffin and Michaela D.E. Meyer (2018: 5) note, existing scholarship on Rhimes’s work is limited ‘almost exclusively to critiques of her ‘colour-blind casting policies and their significance to theorisations of race in critical television studies’. This scholarship has been important in underscoring the changing political, cultural, and industrial contexts serving as a backdrop to shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. This body of work provides a lens through which to understand Rhimes’s much critiqued practice of colour-blind casting, that is, employing diverse casts without directly addressing their ethno-racial differences (see Petermon, 2018; Warner, 2015; Washington and Harris, 2018; Young and Pham, 2018; Hanus, 2024 for critiques of Rhimes’s colour-blind practice). What these studies do not directly address is the effect of an industrial shift to streaming on Rhimes’s recent output in an era where streaming has arguably led to a greater diversification of the kinds of stories that can be made, told, and discovered by audiences (Edmond et al., 2024). Bridgerton places issues of race at the centre of television drama and in doing so updates the period drama genre for contemporary streaming audiences through a greater engagement with diversity.

Bridgerton

Bridgerton is the first of Shondaland’s content to Netflix under their multi-year deal and was the most watched Netflix series at the time of its debut in December 2020. Based on Julia Quinn’s historical romance novels of the same name, the eight-book series is set in Regency period London between 1813 and 1827. Season 1 of Bridgerton on Netflix follows the first book in the series, The Duke & I (2000). The series presents an alternate history of a racially diverse Regency era society where the Queen (played by Guyanese-British actress Golda Rosheuvel) is biracial, as is the leading man, the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page, whose mother is Zimbabwean and whose father is English) (Season 1). Bridgerton has been praised for its diverse cast and representation of interracial romance; however, it has also been criticised for casting only lighter skinned black actors in leading roles, and for its stereotypes of villainous or scheming black characters (Hinds, 2021). That is, debates around the portrayal of race in Bridgerton focus on the fact that race is either foreground as too much (resulting in stereotypes), or not enough (pandering to aesthetics of beauty as being fairer skinned).

The period drama has been an enormously popular contemporary genre, although primarily featuring an all-white cast, as exemplified by British drama series Downton Abbey (2010-2015), which received critical and popular acclaim, becoming one of the most watched television shows in the world. Bridgerton joins a number of other revisionist period dramas, including Amma Asante’s biographical drama Belle (2013) starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Armando Ianucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (2013) starring Dev Patel as the eponymous David Copperfield. Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke, 2018) cast British Asian actor Gemma Chan as Bess of Hardwick, and black British actor Adrian Lester as Lord Randolph. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton (2015) is also a successful example of rewriting history with a racially diverse cast playing America’s Founding Fathers. Tony McNamara’s The Great (2020-2023) adapts the period of Catherine the Great’s reign for television and includes actors of South Asian descent Sacha Dhawan and Sebastian De Souza as members of the Russian court. These adaptations have been derided for their historical denial of racism (see Kulak, 2022) at the same time as they have achieved extraordinary popular success with their diverse casting. With an audience of more than 82 million in its first 28 days of release, however, Bridgerton’s success was unsurpassed, breaking records for most watched original series at the time (Netflix).

Colour-blind and colour-conscious casting

The ideology of colour-blind casting operating behind many of these revisionist productions promotes the idea that racism no longer exists nor impacts on the lives and experiences of racial minorities (Petermon, 2018: 114). As Simone Adams, Kimberly R. Moffitt, and Ronald L. Jackson note, ‘the dominance of colour blindness in television has sustained contemporary racial structure(s) by making the ‘reality’ of racial economic inequality, segregation, and discrimination invisible to mainstream (White) America’ (2019: 88).

Colour-blind casting has a long history in theatre and performance, with non-traditional casting a mainstay of Shakespearean theatre since the 1950s (Pao, 2010; Thompson, 2007). Colour-evasive is a more recent term that has been used (mainly in the field of education) to explain how the denial of racial differences by emphasising sameness, though well intentioned, can further entrench inequalities by conflating a lack of eyesight with a lack of knowing, suggesting that racism is perpetuated only through sight (Annamma et al., 2017: 154). According to showrunner Chris Van Dusen (2021), Bridgerton was created through the work of sitting with – and listening to – his actors, exploring the notion that race is ‘not just seen but heard’. The term ‘evasive’ indicates avoidance or escape over explicitly creating solutions to problems (Annamma et al., 2017: 156). For the purposes of this article, I retain the more recognisable term colour-blind, while noting its relationship to terms such as colour-conscious and colour-evasive.

In relation to Shondaland’s long-running series Grey’s Anatomy, Stephanie Young and Vincent Pham argue:

Rhimes’s color-blindness problematically situates characters as ‘raceless’ and situates women of color … in a postracial world that ignores whiteness and systemic racism. Both color-blindness and postracialism posit that individuals should be treated equally regardless of race or ethnicity while masking normative whiteness and overlooking structures that maintain racial disenfranchisement (2018: 141).

The result of this colour-blind approach is that it ‘shifts the burden of responsibility from the industry (e.g. showrunners, production companies, and networks) to the audience’ (Young and Pham, 2018: 141). Nevertheless, as Young and Pham acknowledge, ‘Shondaland’s prevailing use of colour-blind casting has resulted in more ethno-racial actors in roles, which, in turn, undeniably fosters greater visibility of racial diversity on television’ (2018: 141).

It is possible to frame the lack of discussion around race in Bridgerton as a marker of progress; that is, that in a post-racial world there is no longer any need to discuss issues of race. However, this silence (or silencing) also removes any opportunity to explicitly challenge racism as it continues to exist both in front of, and behind, the camera. In a period drama like Bridgerton, this practice can result in an implausible story world, where a marginalised or oppressed race can take on positions in society that they would historically never have access to. For audiences, this can create a utopic world of fantasy and escapism, but it also elides more serious issues of racism. Nylah Burton (2022) writes:

‘Enjoy the fantasy’ is a popular response to people of colour who push back against Bridgerton’s ahistorical world. But it’s not a fantasy. A world isn’t being invented from scratch. Bridgerton contains real historical events, real historical characters. The history that isn’t discussed is Britain’s brutality, which is not the same thing as fantasy. That is denial.

Ruiz Cantu (2022) concurs, referring to this as a ‘façade of diversity’ that ‘reproduces modes of oppression and violence used on Black people since slavery through its colour-blind lens’. By creating a colour-blind, post-racial society, Bridgerton arguably both elides and compounds racism. Actor Regé-Jean Page, however, counters such criticisms with his own experience. With his casting, Page notes, ‘I get to exist as a Black person in this world’ (Lenker, 2020).

Piia Posti notes that Rhimes’s adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Regency romance novels with Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) actors in leading roles ‘challenges not only notions of historical accuracy but also the romance script itself’ (2024: 125). While the role of the Duke allows actor Regé-Jean Page to ‘exist as a Black person in the world’, Posti notes that the Black male hero is reinscribed through this role on the side of negativity, with his darkness embodying a sense of sexual danger (2024: 126). Posti suggests that in Bridgerton, ‘the Black man is not only domesticated and neutralised by entering marriage and by adhering to the rules of Regency society and shouldering his duties as a Duke; he practically disappears from the series once he has fulfilled the romance script’ (2024: 127).

The argument that a colour-blind approach only reinforces white privilege and elides racism is not a straightforward critique to make in relation to Shonda Rhimes’s productions as her investment in diversity and inclusion on television is complex, wide-ranging and cannot easily be contained to her casting choices. Rhimes explains, ‘I’m a product of being a post-feminist, post-civil rights baby born in an era … where race isn’t the only thing discussed. And I just felt like there’s something interesting about having a show in which your characters could just be your characters’ (Warner, 2015: 637). Rhimes defends her reliance on colour-blind casting, noting ‘it works. Ratings-wise, it works’ (Washington and Harris, 2018: 160).

Part of this success may be that Rhimes’s achievements as a showrunner are shored by her (social) media presence, which amplifies the buzz around her shows. This makes her choices more colour-conscious than colour-blind when viewed in this broader context. For example, the publicity surrounding Uzo Aduba’s attachment to the recent Shondaland production The Residence (released in March 2025) is a large part of the show’s appeal. This was similarly the case with How to Get Away with Murder, which touted Viola Davis’s attachment to the project well before it was underway. Colour-conscious casting ‘sees’ race, rather than pretending it does not exist. It is a more intentional practice, recognising that marginalised experiences and the impact of race requires affirmative action, which means casting actors in roles they might not have been written for, and acknowledging that race affects characterisation and narrativisation. Bridgerton is not committed to colour-conscious casting, although it is not entirely ‘blind’ to it.

The constraints of genre and strategic ambiguity

Not only does the series make an intervention in a post-racial historical world, but it also rewrites traditional roles for (black) women on television. One of the lead characters in Bridgerton, Lady Danbury (played by Adjoa Andoh), is, like Queen Charlotte, strong, intelligent, and independent. In Season 2 of Bridgerton, the lead role of Kate Sharma (originally named Kate Sheffield in Julia Quinn’s novel) is reimagined in a performance by Simone Ashley as a feisty, headstrong, and outspoken South Asian woman.

The representational force of these characters is nevertheless constrained by the popular romance genre that the series exemplifies, and indeed the historical romance novels the series are based on. Kate Sharma returns to Season 3 of Bridgerton as a domesticated wife, pregnant with Anthony Bridgerton’s child, true to the conventions of the romance genre privileging women’s roles as wives and mothers. As Shelley Anne Galpin notes, Bridgerton operates as a pastiche of the period drama, ‘using self-conscious aesthetic and representational choices to both pay homage to and challenge traditional period drama tropes’ (2024: 133). Janice Radway has argued in Reading the Romance (1991) that female audiences seek pleasure in romantic fiction, particularly in fictional scenarios that create an imagined history. Julia Quinn’s novels are in the vein of Harlequin romances, and this inhibits their ability to tell particular kinds of historical stories, including those that re-envision race. To do so would be to rebel against the genre’s conventions and forms, precisely those that bring pleasure to readers (and in this case, viewers). As Lisa Hackett and Jo Coghlan (2021) note in relation to Bridgerton, ‘this is a knowing audience who are willing to embrace an alternate vision of the past. Yet there are aspects which need to remain, such as costume, class structure, and technology, which serve to signify the past’. Hackett and Coghlan refer to this as ‘diversifying the bubble’ that is the historical romance. Bridgerton maintains the allure of love solving all problems, albeit in an interracial world.

The tension between the constraints of genre, and what is permissible on a streaming service like Netflix, represents a form of what Joseph (2016) has referred to as Rhimes’s ‘strategic ambiguity’. Tracing Rhimes’s early televisual successes through colour-blind casting in Grey’s Anatomy, to her more explicit address of race in series such as Station 19 and Scandal, Joseph notes that strategic ambiguity is a way to redefine Rhimes’s brand of black respectability politics in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, where not speaking up about issues of race is no longer regarded as ‘respectable’. In Rhimes’s case, this involves a deft negotiation of the press and social media. Joseph writes,

[strategic ambiguity] allows for obfuscation, inconsistency, and jubilant multiculturalism. But its ambiguity not only slides critique past post-racial racism – it lets some audiences down by merely winking at audiences of color, positing that the audience is simply pleased to see themselves, as people of color, reflected on their screens. And for some, it might feel like a relief to experience virtual diversity without racialized strife (2016: 316–317).

Jade Petermon makes a similar observation in relation to Grey’s Anatomy, noting the showrunner’s and writers’ failure to address racism ‘even when storylines beg the question or can bear the weight’ (2018: 114). Within the constraints of the historical drama, can Bridgerton ‘bear the weight’? Are contemporary streaming audiences willing to accept more than strategic ambiguity, or does Bridgerton present the exemplary case of giving viewers the pleasure to experience ‘diversity without strife’?

The embodied presence of the strong black female lead in Bridgerton, within an historically white patriarchal system, offers new viewing pleasures to contemporary streaming audiences, while at the same time it threatens to destabilise old ones. As Janell Hobson notes in relation to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), the first feature film directed by an African American woman to be distributed theatrically in the United States, ‘Because the black female body poses such a threat to the white patriarchal system, it has been rendered invisible, for fear that the visibility of a sexually desirable woman would disrupt the accepted constructions of whites as beautiful, as the norm’ (Hobson, 2002: 52). The gaze, as it has widely been theorised in film studies (and initially developed by Laura Mulvey (1975)), is traditionally aligned with a (white) male spectator. As a counter to this schema, bell hooks (2015) conceptualises a ‘black oppositional gaze’, whereby black and feminist viewing positions combine visual pleasure with confrontation and interrogation. As Hobson elaborates, ‘the visual pleasure of the ‘oppositional gaze’ does more than replicate voyeurism; it probes, revises, and inspires to see differently. … [T]he black female spectator repositions herself as a viewer and critic by centring black female subjectivity in the arena of visual pleasure’ (2002: 54). Hobson notes that the black female filmmaker can ‘advance this position even further once she gains authority behind the camera to reshape the gaze and redefine such pleasure for her audience’ (2002: 54).

These words, used to describe Julie Dash’s film contributions more than 30 years ago, resonate for Shonda Rhimes as a producer for Netflix today. Proudly proclaiming herself to be ‘the highest-paid showrunner in television’ at the Elle magazine ‘Women in Hollywood’ event in October 2018, Rhimes was deliberate in making the point that women can and should be proud of their achievements, in the same way men are often so comfortable with self-promotion. Indeed, Rhimes is heavily involved in the promotion of her shows and is well known for her engagement with social media, particularly to draw attention to issues of diversity and inclusion.

Fandom, social media, and race

Rhimes’s X (formerly Twitter) account was nominated for a 2015 Shorty Award, which recognises social media content across platforms. Her nomination read: ‘Shonda Rhimes knows how to write long-running television dramas. But she’s also a master of the short, snappy Tweet’ (Otterson and Aurthur, 2021). Shondaland has a digital arm responsible for media content, and a podcast division launched in 2019. Rhimes was involved in a partnership with hair and skin care company Dove in Project #ShowUs, to diversify images of women in the media. Project #ShowUs is a photo database of more than 5000 images of women and non-binary individuals to show a more inclusive vision of beauty for advertisers and the media, and more accurately reflect the population. During the 2015 American Academy Awards ceremony, Rhimes was involved in the #AskHerMore campaign, to demand that reporters ask better questions of female celebrities on the red carpet beyond what dresses they are wearing. Armando Tinoco (2023) observes, ‘Most of the shows that Rhimes has created drive conversations on social media … with a vocal fan base suggesting ideas of what the characters should do next’. Anna Everett notes in relation to Scandal that Rhimes’s ‘online gladiators have carved out a powerful racially inclusive virtual space for the type of hashtag activism organised around a jubilant multiculturalism’ (2015: 58). In Everett’s argument, Rhimes’s productions are influenced by their audiences, many of whom self-identify as Black women. ² This is arguably the case in relation to the Bridgerton prequel Queen Charlotte (2023), which comes after Bridgerton in terms of its release and can be seen as a form of redress to fan dissatisfaction with Bridgerton’s failure to directly address issues of race. Part 1 of Bridgerton Season 3 was released on 16 May 2024, only 12 days after the release of Queen Charlotte on 4 May 2024.

This active engagement with fans and social media is reflected in how issues of race have evolved across the Bridgerton universe from the first three series of Bridgerton to Queen Charlotte, the Bridgerton spin off. Season 1 of Bridgerton did not overtly address the issue of race. That is, race is taken for granted as part of the colour-blind casting process and the series does not explicitly address why a period drama of Regency era Britain features nobility of different races. Season 2 adds complexity to the conversation around the ‘strong black female lead’ by introducing a South Asian protagonist with only a throwaway reference made to the Indian colonies. By Season 3, race is almost a non-event, with the spotlight on Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and his relationship with Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan), who is revealed to be Lady Whistledown. Reprising the use of string quartets to cover well known Western pop songs in Season 1, Season 2 gestures to its South Asian characters by providing an orchestral cover of ‘Khabi Khushi Khabi Gham’ from the Bollywood film of the same name. As to whether these touches are primarily stylistic, or whether there is a deeper attempt being made at inclusion and a robust discussion about race, requires closer attention to Rhimes’s involvement with Netflix, and Netflix’s investment in Shondaland.

Streaming diversity: Netflix’s investment in diversity and inclusion

Netflix’s Vice President, Inclusion Strategy, Vernā Myers reports that Bridgerton is a result of the company applying an ‘inclusion lens’ to its creative decisions (Bakare, 2021). For Myers, this means hiring and supporting diverse creatives, and devising and implementing strategies to improve cultural diversity, equity and inclusion across Netflix’s global operations. In January 2021, Netflix released the first report of its Inclusion Strategy, examining all films and series commissioned by the company between 2018 and 2019 against 22 indices of diversity and inclusion, including sexuality, disability, race, and gender (Myers, 2021). The report showed many positive gains over this 2-year period in relation to the diversity of on-screen talent as well as creators, producers, writers, directors, and cinematographers. Netflix reports having doubled the number of black employees since 2017 (with 8 percent of the workforce identifying as black). Netflix has published its diversity data quarterly on its jobs site since 2013. Currently, women make up nearly half of its U.S. workforce (47.1 percent), including at the leadership level (directors and above: 47.8 percent). Nearly half of its U.S. workforce (46.4 percent) is made up of people from one or more underrepresented racial and/or ethnic backgrounds, including Black, Latinx or Hispanic, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific Islander backgrounds (Myers, 2021). Myers comments, ‘We’ve got to get folks in front of the camera and behind the camera. [When that happens] you’re going to get something you’ve never seen before. Bridgerton is something we have never seen before’ (cit. Bakare, 2021).

Shondaland’s 2017 deal with Netflix was extended in 2021 to include feature films, as well as potential gaming and virtual reality content, in addition to television (White, 2021). The deal also includes a branding and merchandising component, incorporating live events and experiences. This has resulted in the staging of a Bridgerton ball (‘The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience’) that has been held across the US, the UK and Australia. An integral component of the newly expanded deal is Netflix’s investment in Shondaland’s mission to create Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) programmes that can increase industry workplace representation for underrepresented groups (Netflix, 2021). These programmes include the Shondaland Producers Inclusion and Ladder Initiatives (Netflix, 2023b). The programmes are designed to provide an opportunity for individuals from underrepresented groups in the United States to gain on-set experience and training. The Ladder Initiative was piloted on Bridgerton Season 2, with a new cohort starting on Queen Charlotte in the United Kingdom. Through this programme, six trainees received mentoring and coaching in the Assistant Directing, Sound, Camera, Props, Locations and Video departments. All six trainees who were placed on Queen Charlotte were hired onto other productions upon graduating from the programme. Following this successful endeavour, a further 15 trainees were placed on Bridgerton Season 3.

Shondaland’s DEIA programmes form part of the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity, created in 2021 following the first Netflix Inclusion report. The Fund is focused on training creatives for job opportunities on local Netflix productions. Over 5 years, the company has invested US$100 million into creating more pathways for talent from underrepresented communities across the world, partnering with over 80 organisations in more than 35 countries to develop above and below the line pipeline opportunities. Rhimes notes, ‘Shondaland has always been committed to finding and investing in an inclusive pool of talent both in front of and behind the camera. Our partnership with Netflix has allowed us to continue this journey to true equity on a global scale’ (Netflix, 2023a).

Beyond the corporate and public relations speak, streaming services like Netflix are notably challenging traditional television models. Relying on subscribers around the world, the streamers require vast libraries of original content tailored to specific audiences. To ensure distinctive offerings, they must also develop more original programming, and consequently seek to partner with high profile, bankable producers like Shonda Rhimes. As Kevin Fallon (2017) notes, ‘Streaming hasn’t just changed the way people watch TV. It has changed the business model, too’. Fallon suggests that we are in a ‘Golden Age of diversity’ due to the creative freedom afforded by streaming services. This interplay between the producer, her fan base, and Netflix’s investment in diversity (Asmar et al., 2022) has resulted in a retelling of a period drama for contemporary audiences, and this has expanded into the broader Bridgerton universe including Queen Charlotte.

Rhimes serves as Executive Producer on the Bridgerton series, with Chris Van Dusen the showrunner of Seasons 1 and 2. For Queen Charlotte, Rhimes has taken over as showrunner, and there is a remediation of how race is foregrounded, specifically in the form of a prequel, arguably thereby providing the set up for race to be effectively ‘ignored’ across the first two seasons of Bridgerton (Queen Charlotte takes place after the events of Bridgerton Season two, but before the plot of Bridgerton Season 3). Rhimes’s strategic ambiguity is evident in her negotiation between genre (the revision of the historical romance), industry (Rhimes’s move to a streaming platform, and her ongoing social media engagement with audiences) and casting (from colour-blind to colour-conscious, and back again – through the temporal shifts of the Bridgerton universe). Queen Charlotte provides a complication in the form of a prequel, which seeks to expand, in some very limited ways, the generic conventions traditionally associated with the historical romance genre.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story

Following the success of the first two Seasons of Bridgerton, Rhimes released a prequel, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, on Netflix in May 2023, just days before the premiere of Bridgerton Season 3. Queen Charlotte is a six-part series focussing on the young Queen Charlotte’s rise to power, from Charlotte Mecklenburg-Strelitz’s arrival at the British court at the age of 17, to her marriage to King George III. Some historical accounts (largely debunked) suggested that Charlotte came from Black Portuguese royalty, and Rhimes took this rumour as the basis for her story (Rose, 2023). The implied audience, referred to throughout the series as ‘Gentle Reader’, are told in a prologue that what they are about to view is ‘not a history lesson. It is fiction inspired by fact’, and that ‘All liberties taken by the author are quite intentional’. The implied ‘author’ is, of course, Shonda Rhimes, who has taken over as showrunner to tell another ‘Bridgerton story’.

Within its first 4 days, Queen Charlotte recorded 148.28 million hours viewed worldwide (193 million hours in its first week) according to Netflix (Netflix, 2023b). It reached the top 10 in 91 countries and ranked No. 1 in 76 of those. While Bridgerton did not directly address the issue of race with its colour-blind approach, its prequel, Queen Charlotte, tackles the issue of race head on. The throwaway line uttered by Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) in Season 1 of Bridgerton – ‘We were two separate societies divided by colour until the king fell in love with one of us’ – was not given further explanation or elaboration in Bridgerton, however it becomes the key focus of Queen Charlotte. The Princess Dowager Augusta (Michelle Fairley) has searched far and wide for a suitable match for her son, the young King George (Corey Mylchreest), whose mental state appears to be deteriorating. When the young Charlotte (played by India Amarteifio) arrives at court, a surprised Princess Augusta consults with her advisors from the House of Lords:

Princess Augusta: ‘She is very brown’.

Advisor: ‘I did say she had Moor blood, M’aam’.

Princess Augusta: ‘You did not say she would be that brown’.

Advisor: ‘But I did say she had Moor blood’.

Princess Augusta: ‘Very Brown. Thoughts?’ (Episode 1).

In response to this ‘problem’ of race, the Palace decides to make the royal match appear intentional; that is, that a ‘very brown’ Queen was deliberately chosen (just as the ‘liberties’ Rhimes has taken with the series are also quite intentional). To continue with this ruse, the Palace rapidly and hastily expands the guest list for the wedding – due to take place in 6 hours – to include the upper classes of other races and ethnicities, namely, ‘people who look like our new Queen’. This group of Black and Asian nobility are invited to join the top tier of the social hierarchy, the ‘Ton’ (le bon-ton) and are bestowed titles and land. And so begins what is referred to in the series as ‘The Great Experiment’, an attempt to unite the races at court as though it were a deliberate act, rather than a mistake of having arranged a bride who is accidentally too ‘brown’. What cannot be engineered is the genuine love that develops between the young Queen Charlotte and the young King George, which prompts explicit conversations about race.

Interracial romance

The focus on interracial romance in Shondaland’s earlier productions have been addressed by Mark Orbe (2018) and Myra Washington and Tina Harris (2018) in relation to Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. Focussing on Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte, Stephanie Hanus (2024), considers how Rhimes’s use of colour-blind casting influences the portrayals of race and gender through interracial intimacy (448). William Joseph Sipe (2023) identifies this use of interracial intimacy and colour-conscious casting within a regime of capitalist realism. This extends earlier research that sees neoliberalism as the basis for removing racial and gendered barriers to utopian fantasy (see Petermon, 2018; Washington and Harris, 2018; Young and Pham, 2018). As Sipe argues, ‘The world of Bridgerton reduces deeply, structural racial and patriarchal hierarchies to individual biases that can be overcome via the capitalist mandate to desire’ (2023: 341). More bluntly, Sipe puts it: ‘Racism was dismantled because a white man loved a Black woman. This model of desire – a powerful white person desiring and wooing a racial Other – is repeated again and again as each Bridgerton sibling comes of age’ (2023: 335).

The exception to the model of interracial romance governing the narrative world in Bridgerton is in the figure of Lady Danbury, who is married to Lord Danbury (played by Cyril Nri, a Nigerian-born English actor). ³ The young Lady Danbury (Arsema Thomas), who quickly befriends Queen Charlotte, delivers some of the most direct and cutting lines about race in the series Queen Charlotte. In Episode 2, she tells Princess Augusta that her family in Sierra Leone are wealthy and ‘have more money than most of the Ton. What I need is for my husband to not be denied entry to Whites [sic]. I need my husband to be invited on the hunts. I need to be able to cross the street to the best modiste, to take the finest seats at the opera. … We need to be equal members of the Ton’. In Episode 3, when Lady Danbury decides to throw the first ball of the season, none of the white members of the Ton will attend until it is announced the King and Queen will be in attendance. She says to the Queen, ‘You are the first of your kind. That opened doors so we are new [sic]. Do you not see us, what you are meant to do for us?’ A dance between King George and Queen Charlotte paves the way for other members of the aristocracy to intermingle, and the evening is a great success. George says to Charlotte after the ball, ‘With one evening, one party, we have created more change, stepped forward more, than Britain has in the last century. More than I would have ever dreamed’. Netflix’s Vernā Myer’s tagline is: ‘Diversity is being asked to the party, Inclusion is being asked to dance.®’ – This seems fitting for the scene in Queen Charlotte where dancing with a partner of a different race propels the ‘The Great Experiment’ forward. The series also broaches questions of succession and inheritance and how the laws should be modified to be more equitable across the races.

Beyond race, the series also confronts issues of gender and ageism. It openly discusses older women’s sexuality and sexual desires, under the euphemism, ‘Gardens in bloom’, the title of Episode 5. The series again provides a frank and direct engagement with a topic that is rarely discussed on television. This theme is returned to in Bridgerton Season 3 in the romance between Violet Bridgerton and Lady Danbury’s brother, Lord Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis). In Queen Charlotte, Lady Danbury says to Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), ‘Lady Whistledown never writes of our hearts. We are untold stories’. The society of that era is focused on marrying off the younger generation and producing heirs, with older women in society relegated to the background once this duty has been performed. Queen Charlotte places these women at the centre of the narrative. The series also features the first gay couple in the Bridgerton universe; Brimsley (Sam Clemmett), the Queen’s butler, is in a covert relationship with the King’s valet Reynolds (Freddie Dennis).

The boldness of Queen Charlotte is that not only does the series portray characters of diverse races, genders and sexualities, but it does not back down from a discussion about these topics. Not only does race exist in the world of Queen Charlotte, but so does racism. Queen Charlotte is a notable shift from earlier seasons of Bridgerton in its explicit engagement with issues of race. The fact that Queen Charlotte is a prequel to the Bridgerton series provides an interesting frame for how we might consider its place in the franchise. Coming after Bridgerton in time, this engagement with race relations might appear as an afterthought and a reactive response to fan feedback (and therefore belated). Alternately, as a prequel, it could be argued that Queen Charlotte’s timing is just right, demonstrating a natural progression from the first two series of Bridgerton, as though this development was intentional and planned all along. As a prequel to Bridgerton, we are invited to read Queen Charlotte in a different light, questioning whether in producing the series Rhimes was responding to criticisms of Bridgerton’s failure to speak explicitly about issues of race, or whether Rhimes intended this engagement with race all along.

Conclusion

This article has sought to consider how Shonda Rhimes’s move to streaming has enabled her to advance an engagement with race and gendered performance in her Netflix productions that extends beyond what she was able to achieve on network television. The article explored how Shondaland has transformed the traditional period drama through colour-blind and colour-conscious casting, and a focus on strong female leads of colour and interracial relationships. The breakout successes of Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte have been driven by Rhimes’ active engagement with her fans on social media and leverage Netflix’s investment in policies promoting diversity and inclusion.

Commenting on Rhimes’s long-running series Grey’s Anatomy, Kristen J. Warner asks

How is a show that neutralizes race still considered by critics to be a show, well, about race? The answer lies in the complex web of showrunner self-fashioning, extratextual interviews with the cast, and the … text itself. At the intersection of each of these elements lies the idea that the success of this series and of Rhimes as producer is tethered to the use of racialized bodies as signifiers of historical progress in the struggle of televisual racial representation as well as undermining the diversity of those bodies through a laundering, or white washing, of social and cultural specificity (2015: 633).

As period dramas, Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte’s investment in social and cultural specificity is highly visible at the level of representation, even while the shows are entirely modern and made for contemporary audiences. This balancing act is managed by Rhimes’s extratextual engagement with the media and her audiences, and the textual nimbleness of the shows themselves, with their focus on strong black female leads. New conversations about race (and casting) are taking place that did not exist before Bridgerton (Posti, 2024: 142). ‘The phenomenon of Bridgerton has forced media, fandom, and scholars to engage in a conversation about the unstable semiotics of race, across the boundaries of their respective spheres’ (Posti, 2024: 141).

Carrie Wilson-Brown and Samantha Szczur point to the very real challenges faced by African American women in leadership despite the rhetoric in Rhimes’s shows that society at large is post-feminist and post-race (2016: 226). The authors note that Rhimes works within an industry with a fraught history of African American textual representation, yet as a respected producer and showrunner Rhimes has the power to transform the industry to some degree. With the growth in streaming services, there are more African American media professionals and content creators, which will continue to diversify the available voices in the industry (Wilson-Brown and Szczur, 2016: 238).

To return to the question of what Rhimes can do on a streaming service like Netflix that she was not able to on network television, and correspondingly, what Netflix can do to extend and challenge the female-led television Rhimes is synonymous with, it is arguable that Rhimes’s move to the streaming service renews a dialogue about race amongst a global audience. The simultaneous release of all episodes on Netflix, and the company’s global reach achieves two things: firstly, it provides an immersive experience (for audiences who binge-watch), and relatedly, it provides an opportunity to engage audiences in a (global) dialogue about race. Netflix provides creative freedom and global reach among its more than 247 million subscribers across 190 countries (Netflix, 2024). And, for the company, in appealing and responding to this broad audience, diversity is key, as Shondaland’s wildly successful productions remind us again and again.

The newer titles in the Shondaland Netflix slate, including The Residence, a comedic eight-episode murder-mystery series starring Uzo Aduba of Orange is the New Black fame, and documentary Black Barbie (Lagueria Davis, 2023), which features Rhimes as an interview subject and herself a Mattel ‘Black Barbie’, encourage us to reflect on the boundaries that Rhimes continues to expand via a combination of her stories, her choice of a new platform for these stories (Netflix), and her extratextual persona and social media engagement.