How Bridgerton killed the costume drama

 

How Bridgerton killed the costume drama

 

The Telegraph

 

 Netflix’s swaggering Regency romp is back for a second series – but is its enormous success entirely for the good?

 

Television Editor's Choice, Television

3/24/2022 7:30:00 PM

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/bridgerton-killed-costume-drama/

 

 It was only a matter of time before the Americans came for our costume dramas. They’ve been consuming them, hungrily, for decades, dimly aware that somewhere in their DNA is the need for the vitamin-hit of a corseted maiden exchanging furtive glances with a grumpy baron inside an English Heritage folly. This is England, they think, this is my ancestry. This is the real thing. America, until recently, has been too bashful, too deferent to the mother tongue, to actually make an English costume drama. ...

 

 That has changed. Not only are Uncle Sam’s tanks on the lawns of Castle Howard, but his GIs are in the Antique Passage having their way with the countess.I speak, of course, of Bridgerton, Netflix’s Regency romp/adventure playground, which returns tomorrow for eight more episodes of hot, scurrilous Jane Austen fan fiction (premise: what if we turned all those furtive glances into knee-tremblers in the drawing room?). Based on the novels by Julia Quinn (American), Bridgerton is an entertaining but ersatz fantasy land, with little interest in historical accuracy but an enormous appetite for the superficial airs and graces of early 19th-century English society.

 

 It is produced by Shonda Rhimes’s all-conquering Shondaland company (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Inventing Anna), with the confidence and belligerence of an oligarch eyeing a Tudor mansion in the Cotswolds: “Why can’t it be mine?”Bridgerton has been an enormous global success – Netflix’s biggest English-language series – with series three and four already commissioned (there are eight novels to work through, knee-trembler fans). While it is no surprise that the drama was lapped up across the Atlantic, its considerable success in the UK is more interesting and has major ramifications for the nation as a powerhouse of serious-minded, straightforward, literary costume drama. It looks like Bridgerton has killed off the traditional costume drama.

 

 Long before it landed on Netflix, on Christmas Day 2020, in the height of lockdown, Bridgerton was making headlines for its diverse casting. It isn’t quite colour-blind casting – the black characters are black, the white characters are white, and so on – but the quiet television revolution going on inside Bridgerton is that, for the purposes of this show, race does not matter, despite the setting being Regency England.

 

 Several prominent families in its high society are non-white, while Queen Charlotte is mixed race (which may, in fact, be historically accurate, but that’s of no particular concern to Bridgerton). It is more akin to Dev Patel being cast as David Copperfield in Armando Iannucci’s superb film adaptation. The message from viewers, especially younger viewers, is very clear: all-white casting, even in a costume drama that wants to be historically accurate, is a big turn off.

 

 Bridgerton rips up the costume drama rulebook in many other ways too: female empowerment, an anachronistic soundtrack (Nirvana played by a string quartet, etc.), a less than slavish devotion to contemporary speech and, most notably, oodles of rumpy-pumpy. And it arrived on these shores at a time when we were seemingly falling out of love with dusty old books adapted by dusty old men – the nation’s traditional source of costume drama.

 

 The 1970s through to the early 2000s was a period of untrammelled success for the British costume drama industry, potentially reaching its apex in 1995 with notable productions of Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice. We are now coming to the end of what we might call the Downton Abbey era. Though not adapted from a novel, Julian Fellowes’s Sunday-night soap opera was a faithful costume drama in every other sense, and, in a Chekhovian twist, presaged the death of the costume drama itself. What is Downton but a chronicle of the decline of the British aristocracy?

 

 It seemed to close a chapter, signalling the end of our obsession with the past. In this vacuum it would be hard to imagine the BBC or ITV commissioning a strait-laced, historically accurate Austen or Brontë adaptation or, perhaps the purest example of them all, the superb 1981 Brideshead Revisited, less a TV drama than a costumed recitation of the book. headtopics.com

 

 Traditional costume dramas are still getting made, but they creak, don’t they? Right now, Fellowes’s The Gilded Age and Andrew Davies’s Sanditon are on television. They include diverse casting yet, nevertheless, seem as old-fashioned as can be with their slow-paced tales, stuffy glances and somewhat broad-brush characters.

 

 And considering this pair, Fellowes and Davies, have been the giants of British costume drama for decades, their recent output has failed to provide a hit. Belgravia, The English Game, Les Misérables, A Suitable Boy – none of these struck the chords their predecessors did. Davies’s sublime 2016 War & Peace is the last truly great British costume drama.

 

 Is it a loss, then, that we are unlikely to see the likes of War & Peace again? I admire the sexy, swaggering Bridgerton. And, make no mistake, it is merely the headline show of a pack of in-your-face, anachronistic period dramas – there’s also the Russian Empire as a black-comic farce in The Great and interwar inner city British gangs given the Guy Ritchie, rock’n’roll treatment in Peaky Blinders.

 

 However, it feels a shame that the razzle dazzle attractions of these programmes look like, for the time being at any rate, as if they are monopolising the screen-writing talents of those seduced by corsets and top hats. What’s now almost entirely neglected is any televisual interrogation of this era whose pursuit is authenticity, probably most persuasively achieved via the insights of a great contemporary novelist who knew rather more about it than we do, and was less eager to “correct” it. headtopics.com

 

 Surely, the television landscape has room for both.