It’s a mistake to dismiss Bridgerton as fluffy period drama

Bridgerton was deliberately ‘color-conscious’ from the get-go, with Regé-Jean Paige playing Simon, Duke of Hastings.& FlxPix / Alamy by Shelley Galpin, King’s College London A couple of years ago, I was chatting to a friend about our recent television consumption. She was extolling the virtues of the US crime drama Breaking Bad. Not having seen it at the time, I didn’t have a great deal to say. “I’m loving Bridgerton at the moment,” I ventured. “Bridgerton is just fluff,” she replied. “Breaking Bad is art.” No doubt many readers would agree with her, although as a scholar of period drama, this response caused a number of protestations to bubble up within me. In the name of friendship I swallowed them, so am unable to tell you exactly what my friend considered was “fluffy” about Bridgerton. It could be the heavy emphasis on romance, or maybe the lavish and pastel-toned aesthetics. It could even be the anachronistic approach to historical representation. What I do know is that this assessment of value will be familiar to many, whether fans of Bridgerton or not. As many feminist screen theorists have pointed out, there is a persistent application of gendered value judgments that sees...