From Bridgerton to The Great: How period dramas finally embraced the 21st century
Tuning into Bridgerton, Netflix’s new period series from super-producer Shonda Rhimes, feels like falling into a post-modern Jane Austen fever dream. A string quartet plays Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next as revellers of all races file into a dazzling ballroom, while Julie Andrews, voicing acid-tongued society scandalmonger Lady Whistledown, dishes out bitchy zingers like Regency London’s answer to Gossip Girl. It plays fast and loose with historical accuracy, but makes for pacy, addictive viewing.
Much as we love to see Colin Firth emerging from a lake, costume dramas have never been the coolest, most innovative of genres. They’re the M&S of the telly world: comfortable, reliable, definitely not cutting edge. Now though, that’s changing. You can trace the beginnings of a shift back to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette, an anachronistic confection that aimed to capture the queen’s teen spirit with its mad party scenes and post-punk soundtrack. Fast-forward a decade or so and The Favourite, starring Olivia Colman as Queen Anne, showed us historical poshos as we’d never seen them before, with dark comedy, lesbian sex and f-bombs.
The runaway success of Sarah Phelps’s pitch-black Agatha Christie adaptations for the BBC, starting with And Then There Were None in 2015 and concluding with The Pale Horse earlier this year, has certainly proved our appetite for period pieces stripped of cosiness. “The whole notion of what is a traditional adaptation of a favourite novel is fraught with a very weird yearning for something that never existed in the first place,” Phelps says. “It’s ‘let’s look back, everybody was white, everybody knew their place and it was safe.’ If you’re going to do that you’re buying into something that’s quite dangerous — it gives you a skewed sense of nostalgia for a time that never existed.” Her modus operandi is simple: “Don’t look at any other adaptation, just read the work.” One disgruntled Twitter user, she recalls, took her to task for “ruining Poirot by making him a refugee” in 2018’s The ABC Murders, which invited viewers to draw parallels between the rise of far-Right nationalism in the Thirties and Brexit Britain. “It’s like ‘Dude, that’s canon!’ There’s a lot [in the book] about the hatred of the other, that roiling feeling of something truly horrible festering in Britain. It doesn’t take much to draw out.”
The upper-class marriage market of Regency London might not seem like such an obvious source of contemporary parallels, but for Bridgerton showrunner Chris Van Dusen, refracting period romance “through this really contemporary lens” was “where a lot of the fun came from” in the writing process. “We’re taking creative liberties where we need to — it’s funny, it’s witty and it’s also really sexy.” First up? Re-imagining the dance scenes as a kind of real-life Tinder. “Instead of dating apps, they just swipe left and right in those ballrooms until the early hours,” he says. Shondaland series have always put the female gaze first, a tradition Bridgerton upholds: some of the sex scenes will doubtless prompt outraged headlines, but they’re always framed as part of a character’s self-discovery.
Costume drama is arguably British film and television’s most bankable genre — just look at the international success of Downton Abbey and The Crown — yet it has often presented an exclusively white version of life in the past, with a woeful track record when it comes to decent roles for people of colour. As actor Riz Ahmed put it in 2016, “the reality of Britain is vibrant multi-culturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies.”
Small Axe, the ground-breaking anthology series from Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen, has provided a much-needed corrective to this imbalance. Airing on Sunday nights on BBC One since November, each film explores the experience of London’s West Indian communities, spanning from the late Sixties to the Eighties.
“These are the untold British stories,” McQueen said in a recent interview with Sight & Sound. “People must understand that there are other histories that make up the history of our nation.” His films, including Mangrove, have prompted calls for an overhaul of how black British history is taught in schools — proof that there’s power in the period drama yet. A new way of casting historical pieces is also starting to emerge. Back in January, Dev Patel became the first British-Asian actor to lead a Dickens adaptation, taking on the title role in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield. “Armando says it better than anyone,” Patel said. “He’s like ‘Why can’t I just draw from 100 percent of the acting community?” Patel’s next project is Green Knight, where he’ll play Arthurian hero Sir Gawain.
The concept of “colour-blind” casting, though, is a contested one that risks ignoring the discrimination and industry imbalances which actors of colour face. “Colour blind implies that colour and race isn’t considered,” says Van Dusen. “And that’s not true for Bridgerton — it’s a part of the conversation.” For many casting directors, a “colour conscious” approach which actively acknowledges race is a better, more nuanced option. It’s a tactic that Rhimes pioneered in contemporary series like Grey’s Anatomy and has become a major part of Shondaland’s inclusive ethos. As Van Dusen puts it, “we cast the best actors for the roles in ways that represent the world today”.
Bridgerton’s high society milieu is rooted in the court of Queen Charlotte, played by British-Guyanese actress Golda Rosheuvel. Some historians believe the wife of the absentee George III (of Madness fame) to be Britain’s first mixed-race royal. “It made me wonder — what could that have looked like?” Van Dusen says. “Could she have elevated other people of colour in society and given them lands and titles? That’s really how our [romantic lead] Simon Bassett, our Duke of Hastings, came to be.” The Duke, who combines the small talk skills of a Darcy with the more rakish tendencies of a Wickham, is played by British-Zimbabwean actor Regé-Jean Page.
And there’s more. Next year, Jodie Turner-Smith will become the first black actress to play Anne Boleyn in a Channel 5 drama, which charts the months leading up to her death. She’ll be joined by an ensemble that includes I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu and Hamilton star Jamael Westman. “We wanted the show to reset people’s ideas of who they thought Anne Boleyn was,” says Hannah Farrell, creative director at Fable Pictures. She and partner Faye Ward tackled the series in the same way they’d approached their recent hit Rocks, which was praised for its portrait of a multi-cultural group of London schoolgirls: by aiming to “portray a world that really speaks to the audience about their own contemporary world.” Historical drama and diversity, Farrell adds, might once have felt “mutually exclusive,” but she is hopeful that “there is a cultural shift in how actors are cast in all shows now.”
Previous screen versions of Anne have painted her in two dimensions, as “the seductress, the temptress, the witch,” failing to recognise that, as Farrell puts it, “she was so brave and so contemporary in daring to be an equal to the king.” The three-part series will “revisit her story, but from her perspective,” in the mode of a psychological thriller. That might sound like an unusual mash-up — until you put down Wolf Hall and consider the downright chilling details of Anne’s death. Gaslighting, misogyny and a husband who’s trying to bump her off so he can marry a younger, more fertile model — squint a bit and her tale has the same building blocks as The Girl On The Train. “Everyone talks about Anne’s downfall, but Anne didn’t have a ‘downfall,’ she got murdered,” Ward says. “It’s funny how the edges have been taken off her story [...] We wanted to make sure we reconfigured that.”
Their series is part of a new wave of revisionist takes on some of history’s most screwed-over women. The Great, written by The Favourite scribe Tony McNamara is set to air on Channel 4 next month. It’s a colourful, profanity-laden take on the early years of Catherine the Great, the Russian empress whose towering reputation would later be tarnished by the men she dared stand up to. The series frames the young Catherine (Elle Fanning) as a bold, intelligent woman surrounded by idiots, not least her man-child husband Peter III (Nicholas Hoult).
Phelps, meanwhile, is to write the second series of A Very English Scandal, which will focus on Margaret Campbell, the so-called “dirty Duchess” at the centre of a Sixties sex scandal. She became one of the first women to be publicly slut-shamed when Polaroids showing her in a compromising position with an unknown man emerged as part of her high-profile divorce case. “There’s always been speculation about who the headless man was — I don’t care, I do care who she was,” Phelps says. “I’ve been obsessed with her for a long time — and felt that it would be a really exciting story to tell.” It’s definitely not Downton — I can’t wait.
Bridgerton is on Netflix from December 25.
