Like Hamilton, Bridgerton Normalizes Diversity in Unexpected Ways

Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series Bridgerton has made headlines for breaking viewership records; 82 million people have watched it, making it the platform’s most-watched show ever. The show is loved by many for a number of reasons — its ability to merge the formality and stuffiness of Regency England with the lust and intrigue of a trashy reality TV show is one. But another is the way that Bridgerton deftly handles race, in much the same way Lin Manuel Miranda’s game-changing masterpiece Hamilton did.

Miranda changed the game by casting America’s forefathers — who were all white, and many of whom owned slaves — with people of color. In doing so, he allowed Black and brown viewers to relate to their country’s history in a new way. As Miranda told The New York Times in 2015, “This is a story about America then, told by America now, and we want to eliminate any distance. Our story should look the way our country looks. Then we found the best people to embody these parts. I think it’s a very powerful statement without having to be a statement.” Miranda’s intent was not to erase America’s dubious past, but to view it through a modern lens that allows every American to feel like they are an essential part of the fabric of our present-day nation.

Bridgerton’s showrunner, Chris Van Dusen, told O Magazine that his intent, like Miranda’s, was to tell historical fiction, “to reflect the world that we live in today.” To do so, Van Dusen decided to build on the belief held by some historians that Queen Charlotte was a descendant of a Portugese royal family with African ancestry. “It made me wonder what that could have looked like,” Van Dusen told The New York Times. He set Bridgerton in an alternative historical setting, where Queen Charlotte’s mixed-race heritage was transformative for Black and brown people in England.

Bridgerton viewers may be taken by surprise in the opening scenes of the show when they meet Lady Danbury, a fictional member of 19th-century British aristocracy played by Black actress Adjoa Andoh. But moments later, the audience is likely less surprised by the introduction of the lead male love interest, the Duke of Hastings, played by actor Regé-Jean Page, because we have already been sensitized to Bridgerton’s racial twist. This is the genius of Bridgerton: After the initial surprise of seeing unexpected Black and brown actors in these roles, one becomes so engrossed in the story as to forget about race altogether — and attempt to re-imagine history in a way that treats race as obsolete.

As Page explained of the power of this color-blind casting, “I get to exist as a Black person in the world. It doesn’t mean I’m a slave. It doesn’t mean we have to focus on trauma. It just means we get to focus on Black joy and humanity.”

Deftly weaving an intentional indifference around race in arts and culture and other arenas of public life, like public office, eliminates culturally embedded racism. Normalizing characters of color of all kinds — lovers, princes, magnates, founding fathers, idealists, geniuses, and public servants — dispels intrinsic stereotypes and allows viewers to focus more on our common humanity than on our differences.

To be fair, some critics have said the show still has a race issue because it propagates a hierarchy of skin tones, granting lesser roles to darker-skinned actors. “Like every other Netflix show, the only Black leads allowed are light-skinned,” Kathleen Newman-Bremang, senior editor of Refinery29, wrote on December 28, 2020. “Just sprinkling some light-skinned Blackness in there isn’t enough.” David Oliver wrote in USA Today that “lighter-skinned Black characters on the show mostly hold positions of nobility and darker-skinned Black characters are relegated to the sidelines and appear villainous or violent."

In addition to this potential colorism, the show undermines its mission by opaquely referencing an explanation for this supposedly color-blind world in episode four. Lady Danbury tells the Duke “they” were raised up by the king and could fall out of favor momentarily. “We were two separate societies divided by color, until a king fell in love with one of us,” Lady Danbury cautions the Duke. “Love, Your Grace, conquers all."

For many, this explanation is too simplistic and abrupt. As journalist Sarah Shaffi said in a tweet, “The implication is that the world of Bridgerton was racist until a white king fell in love with a Black woman and bam! White people realised Black people were the same as them, all because of one marriage.” She further criticized, “This comment from Lady Danbury felt at odds with the fact of Bridgerton itself existing as it does, and it felt shoehorned in by some exec who wanted an explanation of why the male lead is a Black man, when actually, we didn’t need an explanation at all.”

While these criticisms are fair, it’s also clear that the show is meant to be escapist eye candy, not a serious lesson in racism and colonization. While American society still has work to do to eliminate the racism deeply embedded in our society, shows like Bridgerton and Hamilton help chip away at it by conditioning viewers to challenge racist stereotypes and instead focus on individuals whose very human stories are universally relatable. Bridgerton is a valuable exercise in suspending judgment about a person and their lived experience at first glance, and the more we can train our minds to do this, the closer our society will be to being truly anti-racist.