Bridgerton showrunner Chris Van Dusen spills the secrets on the global success of the racy Regency romance
As its highly-anticipated second season is released, Bridgerton creator Chris Van Dusen spills the secrets on the global success of the racy Regency romance.
When the lavish Regency romance Bridgerton premiered on Netflix on Christmas Day 2020, it was, as the series’ resident gossip columnist, Lady Whistledown, might have said, “the talk of the Ton”.
With a multiracial cast playing roles from romantic leads to royalty, steamy sex scenes, and costumes and wigs so elaborate they would make a Kings Cross drag queen envious, Bridgerton ventured where no period drama had gone before. This unapologetically frothy confection filled with romance and scandal in Regency England’s mercenary “marriage mart” grew rapidly from a Netflix hit into a global phenomenon, watched by 82 million households in its first 28 days.
Bridgerton’s keenly anticipated second season is released on Friday, and in his only Australian press interview the drama’s creator, Chris Van Dusen, tells Review that soon after season one launched the viewer response turned “into something I never could have expected or anticipated … At the end of January (2021), Netflix sat me down and told me that Bridgerton was their biggest series in the history of the streamer. That was incredible to hear.”
That record has since been eclipsed by the South Korean dystopian saga Squid Game, although Bridgerton – which has been described as a cross between a Jane Austen period drama and the original Gossip Girl – remains the streaming behemoth’s most-watched English-language drama.
I ask the American showrunner and writer, who started his career as an assistant to uber-producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes, about the pressure to match that feat with season two. He replies evenly over Zoom: “I think there’s always been a healthy sense of pressure on the show.”
With the debut season, the onus was on him, he says, not to disappoint fans of Julia Quinn’s best-selling novels, on which the drama is based. Now, expectations have been raised further because of the first season’s extraordinary popularity.
“I’m not afraid of the pressure,” Van Dusen adds. “I think that the pressure makes us all work a little bit harder.”
Van Dusen attributes the show’s appeal to its glamorous 19th-century setting among Britain’s pampered upper class: in this respect, season two does not disappoint, boasting a parade of eye-popping costumes and backdrops that only a Netflix budget could underwrite, from historic country houses and palaces the size of airport terminals to hundreds of gorgeous ball gowns – one dress alone required more than 14,000 crystals in four shades of gold.
Then there are the attention-seeking outfits of Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) – an original black character Van Dusen created for the show – who has a sly sense of humour, 15 children and a menagerie that includes zebras and an elephant. And of course she is always wearing the biggest wig in the room.
“The Regency time period was such a fascinating time of decadence and excess and beauty,” says Van Dusen. “It was over the top and that’s why I love it so much and why audiences love it so much – you have this amazing dancing, and these incredible costumes and jewellery … That time period really affords us an escape, and I think the escape is what audiences were really seeking.”
While season one focused on the union of the titular Bridgerton family’s eldest daughter Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) and the emotionally tortured Duke of Hastings – played by the impossibly handsome Rege-Jean Page who, sadly, has left the series – the new season is about the search for a wife by Daphne’s older brother. The head of his family since his father’s sudden death, Lord Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) is determined to put his head before his heart to protect his wealthy family’s name as he chooses a viscountess.
He has ditched his sideburns and former rakish ways and insists, without a scintilla of self-awareness: “I’m looking for perfection.” Instead, the haughty lord finds himself torn between duty and passion as a complex love triangle develops around him and two new characters – Bombay sisters Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), a conventional “picture of grace, beauty and charm”, and her prickly “gatekeeper” sister Kate (Simone Ashley), a rule-breaker who is considered an old maid at 26.
Meanwhile, the apparently “insipid wallflower” Penelope Featherington, played by Nicola Coughlan of Derry Girls fame, continues to secretly write her widely read scandal sheet and another Bridgerton sister, Elouise (Claudia Jessie), rails against the options available to her as a high-society debutante: hook a rich man or spew bile about her rivals.
Period drama is seen as an intrinsically British genre – for years, the BBC cornered the market in screen adaptations involving balls, bounders, heaving bosoms and pointedly elegant dialogue. When Bridgerton was first being developed by Netflix and Shondaland – the Rhimes-owned powerhouse production house behind hit shows Grey’s Anatomy and Inventing Anna – were eyebrows raised, as the Americans advanced on the genre?
Van Dusen chuckles and replies: “I’m sure some eyebrows were raised. I personally never saw those eyebrows being raised. The production team are Americans, but I’ve always loved the genre and I’ve always loved a good period show.
“Yeah, they (period dramas) are considered a little traditional and a little conservative, and what got me really excited about adapting these novels was the chance to create the period show that I had always wanted to see.”
In the new season, sparring partners turned star-crossed lovers Kate and Anthony recall the acclaimed 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in which Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerged from a lake with a wet shirt clinging to his torso, and Van Dusen reveals he was partly inspired by that adaptation.
“I love all of Jane Austen,’’ he says. “I’m a big fan of all those novels and I did watch a number of period pieces when I was developing the show … At the time, Colin Firth coming out of the lake with his white shirt – it was revolutionary because it hadn’t been done before … especially in this genre. I think that’s why I really wanted to push a few boundaries … and turn the volume up on multiple levels.”
There is an overt nod to Firth’s wet shirt scene in the new season, but overall it has fewer racy sex scenes than season one. The showrunner emphatically denies he is aiming for a more family-focused audience with this eight-episode season, or appealing to subscribers in more socially conservative countries: “That was never a consideration. Season one and season two’s approach to intimacy really has remained very much the same; that’s always using our sex scenes or intimate scenes to tell a story – we’ve never done a sex scene for the sake of doing a sex scene and we never will,” he says.
“For me, really what the season looks at is the kind of pressures that a sense of duty places on a person and I think that goes for both men and women.”
He adds that the chemistry between romantic lead actors “Jonathan and Simone is palpable”.
The show has broken new ground with its bold commitment to multiculturalism; the Bridgerton aristocracy is ethnically diverse, and cross-cultural marriages and affairs are common among England’s “upper ten thousand”. Van Dusen says he hopes audiences will continue to see such racial diversity as a norm for the period genre: “We wanted the show to reflect the world that we live in today,” he says. “We are set in the 19th century but we still wanted modern audiences to relate to it and to see themselves on screen, no matter who they were.”
Some sceptics have pointed out that embedding black and brown-skinned characters within the 1800s British ruling class glosses over the historical reality that non-white people were then often enslaved or oppressed colonial subjects. Van Dusen responds: “We’re not shying away from the fact that we’re reimagining history as it’s been told and as it’s been fed to us for centuries.”
He and the second season’s other writers collaborated with researchers and historians, “and we all had the same goal of being as authentic as possible, especially when it came to infusing this world with specific details that are linked to the heritage of our Sharma family”.
Filming the new season in pandemic-hit Britain meant the showrunner, cast and crew were “in the thick of it”, Van Dusen says. Production had to be paused in July last year following a Covid-19 outbreak on set and “we had our testing, we had our social distancing and all kinds of protocols to figure out … The audience weren’t going to give us a pass (because of Covid) and I didn’t want to be given a pass.” He relied on special effects in some scenes “to make it look like we had 300 people in a ballroom when in reality we didn’t have near that many, because we couldn’t”.
The Los Angeles-based showrunner and writer worked at Shondaland on high-profile dramas Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal before he devised Bridgerton.
“Shonda is incredibly supportive and we had a shorthand,” he says. “I’ve worked for her and her company for 17-plus years and having that history and having that shorthand … I think it allowed her to feel comfortable in terms of stepping back and letting me follow my own creative vision for the show.”
Netflix has already renewed the series for seasons three and four. Even so, Van Dusan is moving on from the franchise and is juggling several new projects, noting how Bridgerton’s success “has opened a lot of doors for me and I couldn’t be more grateful. It’s thrilling … I’m going to be really busy for the foreseeable future.” His next assignment is a television adaptation of the best-selling young adult novel They Both Die at the End, set in an alternate world in which two key characters are told they have one day to live. Van Dusen says he was “incredibly moved” by this story and is developing this series with the novel’s author, Adam Silvera.
Back in the Bridgerton-verse, his influence will continue to be felt. A spin-off series to be written by Rhimes and based on the origins of Queen Charlotte has been announced. “She was an original character that I created and introduced way back in the Bridgerton pilot,” he says. “I know Shonda’s making a show about her, so I’m definitely excited to see it and see where else this franchise can go.”
Given that Quinn’s series of novels focuses on the eight Bridgerton siblings, is it possible this handsome, high-end melodrama will be with us for years to come?
“I hope so,” Van Dusen responds. “I think it’s any creator’s goal to create characters that can sustain the lifetime of a series – in this case multiple series and an entire franchise. I did a lot of work in these first seasons setting up these characters for future storylines.” With characteristic understatement, he adds: “I was able to do that in a way that will hopefully allow for the continued success of the show.”
Bridgerton season two launches on Netflix on March 25.
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