JoIt’s a Scrooge-y Christmas season for all of us, and so Shonda Rhimes gave us Regé-Jean Page as a little treat.
The page is the male protagonist of Bridgerton, the new vintage soap opera that marks Rhimes ’first project that aired from his huge Netflix deal.
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The series itself is like a mental experiment thinking about asking, “What if Jane Austen had seen Gossip girl and then he was asked to write a TV series that was consumed with a vibrator in his hand? “And Page is the answer to that query, an actor that a colleague of mine — whose identity I won’t reveal to protect her from future restraining orders — decided decisively ‘the hottest man I’ve ever seen.’
But Simon Basset’s page, the messy and emotionally tortured piece that haunts the outer circles — not to mention libidos — of the Regency London society season, is nothing short of fantastic. Bridgerton, especially with the Christmas Day release date at the end of this damn pandemic year.
Surely not what Rhimes or Netflix were planning when it came to how or when to launch this very expensive and very escapist-looking new show. But, as it is, it arrives with serious vibrations of: “You have nothing to do during the holiday season? Here you have sex and corsets from Grey’s Anatomy lady. ”And truly, God bless us all.
Bridgerton it is at that time in British society that we have celebrated to the point of historical fiction in our minds, when balls were made for the sole purpose of matching the majority daughter of a family with the eligible bachelor of a another. A time when decoration is a priority, it could only be a fruitful ground for gossip, which is precisely what it is. Bridgerton seizes.
Enter Lady Whistledown, an omniscient character with the voice of Julie Andrews who thinks the Grosvenor’s Square version of Page six. (If I’ve ever said it, I’ve said it a thousand times: Julie Andrews is the new Kristen Bell.) She’s in everyone’s business, to the point that even the queen keeps indications of who’s in favor of Whistledown. and whose scandals he scrapes through the mud.
Whistledown’s main concern is Daphne Bridgerton, the “diamond” of society’s season; is Tinsley Mortimer, if you will. After a stressful few minutes of “you can’t tell me this isn’t Sansa Stark” while watching Phoebe Dynevor’s performance, you’ll be drawn to her complicated love affair with Simon Basset.
If you have read any of the advance coverage of Bridgerton, you will have heard that this program was. How is sex. A lot. And not like Scandal “That makes it a little hot and then the camera cuts” sex. There are butts! And breasts! And at Christmas! Oh, come all faithful.
The series has a few episodes to get to all the corruption you’ve heard about. At first I wondered, where was all the sex they promised me? And then he showed up. And he came again and again. It was so incessant that I needed to pause and spend a few minutes with God.
At one point, two characters have a heated discussion about the state of their lives together, pause briefly to do a violent round of cunnilingus on a ladder, and then continue their discussion.
“At one point, two characters have a heated discussion about the state of their lives together, pause briefly to do a violent round of cunnilingus on a ladder, and then continue their discussion.”
It’s a big fuss about what is ultimately just one element of the show, though it’s undeniably important. But that underscores how Bridgerton in fact, the intrigue of a legendary network television creator who brings his universe — literally Shondaland — to a broadcast service is good.
It’s not just the explicitness of the love scenes, not even an obviousness like the budget that has allowed him to do a show like this, as if PBS were sending everything center of the Abbey through a Baz Luhrmann Snap Luchmann filter and that’s what came out on the other side.
Too many of these great streaming offerings have found that their creators do essentially the same scheme, only with longer running times, more narrative inflation, and, according to some, a diminished return on quality. With Bridgerton, Rhymes seems to be really taking advantage of doing things narratively (not just in terms of production) that he would never have been able to do on television.
A Regency soap opera that beats with lust? It’s the industry’s enigma around 2020 where it will be an undeniable and massive success for Netflix, but it would never have existed anywhere else.
I mean, folks, it’s not perfect. There are some threads in the story that range from boring to maybe even offensive. For the whole celebration of inclusive, seemingly gender-blind casting, there’s such a selfless turn to a weird story that you wonder why you bother. And the joy with the production can go from cute to twee pretty quickly.
But honestly … whatever. It’s a juicy show that will make you hard and make you cry, a real capture of closed life, while serving a cast so full of attractive actors that by the time the British hottie Freddie Stroma appears, it starts to look almost normal. We are all grateful.