In the ahistorical timeline of Bridgerton, the marriage of Queen Charlotte and King George III is what opened the door to a post-racial society that includes Black dukes and South Asian viscountesse. To unpack this momentous moment, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story sends us back in time to the 1760s when then-Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz is shipped from her home on the continent to Great Britain.
Charlotte is seventeen, and the purpose of her trip is to marry King George III, sight unseen. She is so upset about this she makes macabre jokes to her brother, signer of her marriage contract, about impaling herself on one of the whale bones in her corset. Queen Charlotte gets off to a great start, and it has a lot to recommend it, though it still has that Bridgerton weirdness about socio-political issues and problematic attitude toward bodily autonomy that does no one any favors.
Golda Rosheuvel is back as Charlotte in the Regency era of Bridgerton. There, it is the winter after Kate and Anthony’s marriage, and the royal family is devastated by the death of the Princess of Wales, who died, along with her baby, in childbirth. This is the beginning of the succession crisis that will someday result in Queen Victoria, as Charlotte has thirteen adult children, including three spinster daughters and a brace of sons who have produced over fifty illegitimate children between them, but not one legitimate heir. Charlotte, inspired by Violet Bridgerton’s, er, success in recently marrying off two of her children, decides to play matchmaker and get her single sons to spawn an heir.
Fifty years before, however, she was just a teenager packed off to a strange new home to marry a strange man. India Amarteifio portrays the younger Charlotte, and she is utterly delightful. She captures Rosheuvel’s emotional stiffness and casual meanness to everyone around her, while imbuing the youthful Charlotte with a sort of desperate hope, a sense of a girl clinging to her romantic dreams even though she knows better, even though her arranged marriage seems destined to dash every one of them. Charlotte is temperamental but not flighty, strong but yearning, romantic and frustrated and funny—Amarteifio is a major reason to give Queen Charlotte a chance.
George III, meanwhile, is portrayed in his youth by relative newcomer Corey Mylchreest. He captures the energy of an industrious young man excited by the Enlightenment, and also the frustration of a young man forced into performing elaborate ceremonies and political maneuvers for which he has neither the interest nor patience to foster. He also has GREAT chemistry with Amarteifio, Charlotte and George are immediately believable as a smitten young couple who cannot keep their hands off one another, even as they shout the house down in a battle of wills to determine the shape of their marriage.
Complicating things is George’s undiagnosed mental illness. The series depicts him suffering manic episodes which are carefully hidden from the public and Charlotte herself. The villain of the series is the cruel Doctor Monro (Guy Henry), whose “treatments” seem more about torture than finding any meaningful relief for George. The tragedy of George and Charlotte underpins their whole relationship—no matter how much the determined and forceful Charlotte wants to help George, ultimately, she cannot. And no matter how much George loves Charlotte, he will inevitably leave her, in mind if not body.
This part of Queen Charlotte is great. It’s romantic and sexy and fun and a little bit sad, just that touch of real history bleeding through to keep the whole thing from drifting off as a pure confection of whimsy and pastels. It’s the race stuff that inevitably drags the series down. Once again, no one was asking Bridgerton to explain its casting, the point is to hire the hottest people with the best chemistry to play historical people having romantical problems. On that front: mission accomplished. India Amarteifio and Corey Mylchreest are a fantastic screen couple.
But Queen Charlotte—and Bridgerton at large—is entirely unserious in its handling of race in historical Britain. There is a lot of talk about “the great experiment” and how Charlotte’s presence at court opens doors for people of color in Georgian England, resulting in the first wave of titled non-white aristocrats, but there is zero sense of WHY this is happening. No one ever mentions abolition, an obvious reason to create greater social equality, nor is there any discussion of England’s role in the colonization of America, India, or any other place it claimed during this era. There is just a desire for “the great experiment” to happen, and no explanation as to why or to what purpose. It continues to feel like justifying casting decisions no one needed justified.
Similarly, Queen Charlotte stumbles over the subject of sexual agency much as it did in Bridgerton’s first season. Young Agatha Danbury (Arsema Thomas) finds herself one of the recipients of a new title when Charlotte weds George. She is married to a loathsome man who subjects her to regular bouts of marital rape, after which she scrubs her whole body in a ritualistic bath. Granted, “these are the times” in which Agatha lives, but for all Bridgerton’s and Queen Charlotte’s sense of modernity, there is a strange absence of critique around this subject (all episodes are written or co-written by Shonda Rhimes). Agatha’s trials are almost played for laughs with a recurring visual motif meant to represent Agatha’s suffering of her husband’s assault. It remains an incredibly insensitive blind spot, and it does an injustice to Thomas’s remarkable performance. She, at least, is not playing Agatha’s suffering as anything less than a violation of her bodily autonomy.
There is a lot to recommend Queen Charlotte. The romance is good, the fashion is STELLAR—the elaborate gowns of the Rococo era are especially suited to Bridgerton’s house style—it looks great (all episodes are directed by Tom Verica), seeing Charlotte and Lady Danbury form their friendship amidst court politics and personal challenge is fun and rewarding. But the trouble spots of Bridgerton remain, undercutting strong performances, particularly Arsema Thomas’s great turn as Agatha. It would be so nice if Bridgerton and its spin-offs would commit to being just a romantic fantasy, but as is, you’ll have to grit your teeth through the strangely uncurious representation of race in historic Britain, and the appalling treatment of sexual assault via Agatha’s marriage to enjoy the candy-coated romance of Charlotte and George.
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is now streaming all episodes on Netflix.
Attached: the cast at the at SAG-AFTRA Foundation Screening Room on April 28, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
