The spin-off series of ‘The Bridgertons’ on Netflix offers more sex and an important vindication of its most forgotten characters

You’ll hit play for its connection to ‘The Bridgertons,’ but you’ll stay for all the new and exciting it has to offer: between spin-off and the prequel, ‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’ is a wonderful portrayal of the stories that live on the fringes of one of Netflix’s most successful series.. With just six episodes, it manages to stay true to the ‘Bridgerton’ style while offering us something different that goes beyond the happy endings we’re used to.

This is the reverse of the fairy tale, where a grand palace romance can turn into a nightmare, widowhood can be a desirable fate, ageism banishes women’s desires, and LGTBIQ+ people have to live in the shadows. It touches on issues like mental health, racism, and the complications of romantic relationships with complexity and nuance. And, in the end, it is a story about the young women who survived despite everything to become the bosses of their family (and of their destiny) and years later they find the strength to claim their right to pleasure and love.

The secrets of Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury, revealed

As its title indicates, ‘Queen Charlotte: A Story of the Bridgertons’ puts Queen Charlotte at the center, and she does it through two parallel narratives: the past in which she arrived from Germany to London to marry King George III of England, and the present in which we have met her through the timeline of ‘The Bridgertons ‘, with their mile-long wigs and growing rivalry with Lady Whistledown. Thus, we briefly meet the large group of sons and daughters, the heirs to the throne, who have not been able to find love or secure offspring from the crown. The events in this second narrative line occur right after season 2, so this prequel is also a kind of season 2.5 that plants some seeds for the arrival of season 3 of ‘The Bridgertons’.

Now, this miniseries stands on its own and shows us a reality that is very different from that of the Bridgerton brothers’ romances. Around fifty years before those events that we have already seen, Charlotte’s arrival in London was dubbed ‘The Great Experiment’, because her presence as the first non-white monarch opened the door to a fairer and more egalitarian racial integration among the privileged classes of the country. With Shonda Rhimes at the reins as creator and showrunner, based on Julia Quinn’s novels, the series explains this parallel reality of the late 18th century a little better, while focusing on some familiar faces.

And it is that, despite the title, not everything is about Queen Charlotte: in this parallel narrative between two eras we also find the past and present versions of Lady Danbury and Violet Bridgerton. The three women become the heart of this prequel (with secrets that have remained buried for decades and will now come to the surface, friendships that grow stronger, longings that awaken when they were already believed to be asleep…), where we also find more depth in the stories of such marginal characters up to now as Brimsley, the Queen’s lackey.

More sex and bittersweet romances, but true to the style of ‘The Bridgertons’

In ‘Queen Charlotte: A Story of the Bridgertons’ you will recognize many of the details that characterize ‘The Bridgertons’: yes, there are fiddle-beat covers of pop songs, the occasional voice-over narration by Julie Andrews as Lady Whistledown and moments that will raise the temperature in the living room.. In fact, after a season 2 where there was more erotic insinuation than explicit scenes, this new premiere raises the presence of sex a little more. It is indisputably an expansion of the Netflix series universe while also offering a very different variant of its idyllic meet cutetheir passionate romances or their marriages with a happy beginning (and, hopefully, an ending).

Since its first episode, the miniseries makes it clear that the respective pasts of Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury are filled with shadows. The monarch believes that her arranged marriage may have been more successful than she had imagined, but she will soon have to deal with dehumanizing protocols and the shadow of mental illness at a time when it was simply synonymous with insanity. . Lady Danbury, for her part, has known nothing but an unhappy marriage to a much older man where the only consolation is a hot bath after enduring “marital duties” in bed and the danger of losing everything is constantly on the horizon. around the corner. Even so, friendship grows between her and the Queen, creating the foundation for her close relationship in the present.

A vindication of the forgotten Netflix series

One of the noblest objectives of ‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’ is to focus on a series of characters who, until now, had lived on the margins. What did we really know about Lady Danbury’s yearnings? What did we think of Violet Bridgerton beyond the still latent trauma of losing her husband? What was hiding the opulence of Queen Charlotte and the mysterious absence of the King in the main narrative? The miniseries offers answers to many questions that we had about its secondary characters, and that they had not had the opportunity to tell their story. For example, highlights Brimsley’s romance with the King’s personal lackey, charged with love and frustrations, passion and social and class impediments. Like many of the other stories in this series, it’s a bittersweet romance, but it feels authentic.

In the same way, especially with the timeline of the present, the series reminds us that the “gardens” of women of a certain age are still in need of maintenance, and want to continue to flourish. Too often fiction is obsessed with the romances of youth and values ​​first love above all else, forgetting that passions do not end there. If this spin-off of ‘The Bridgertons’ offers us something essential, it is a reminder that all stories count: those of mothers, widows, lackeys and, also, that of a monarch who was in danger of becoming only a a cartoon. We now know their stories and will recognize them for the complex and fascinating presences that they are as the Bridgerton brothers continue on the front lines looking for love.