I vaguely considered writing something about Bridgerton eighteen months ago because it was the big thing in romance at the time and it seemed like every Ambitious Mama and Determined Batchelor on the internet was required to have a take on it, and I kind of didn’t have one.
Or rather I did, but it was a take that season one by itself didn’t really provide enough material to talk about in my customary level of rambling, discursive detail, because that take was “okay, but what the hell are they going to do for Season Two?”
Welp, season two has happened, so I’ve got an answer now, and it’s an answer I find genuinely fascinating.
This post is called “Metabridgerton” because in a lot of ways this post isn’t actually about Bridgerton at all. It’s more about the specific challenges of adapting a particular kind of romance series to the screen, the specific decisions the showrunners appear to have made in adapting this specific series, and why I—on balance—can understand pretty much all of them even when they represent quite major deviations from the books.
This is probably going to get long, so it’s going to be in subheadings.
Part One: “Okay, But What the Hell are they Going to Do For Season Two?”
If I was more on-form I’d give each of these subheadings a little in-character intro like it’s an edition of Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers but I feel like I’d get halfway through the post, then realise that I’d put way too much effort into a not-very-amusing bit. Plus This Author suspects that the distinctive style of those interstitial fragments is actually way harder to imitate than it seems.
Where was I?
Oh yes.
Back in 2020 and 2021 the whole damned pop culture media landscape went wild for Bridgerton. The internet was flooded with spoonilingus memes, everybody was swooning over Simon and Daphne and their not-your-mama’s-costume-drama sexcapades, and it was soon announced that the show had been picked up for a run of—if I am remembering correctly—eight million and five series.
But even at the time, I remember looking at the buzz surrounding the show and thinking to myself “okay, but how are a TV-watching audience going to deal with the fact that season two isn’t about Simon and Daphne?”
Obviously for book readers, that wouldn’t be a problem. But, and I’m in no way trying to undersell the success that Julia Quinn had already achieved with the series way back in the early 2000s or the passion the book-based fandom has for the world and its characters, TV is a different animal. It has a longer reach, a different style of storytelling, and ultimately a different appeal to different people.
The Bridgerton book series is (and I probably don’t need to remind my audience of this, but bear with me) a style of serial fiction that is very well understood within the romance genre. The long-running series following a single large extended family as they each sequentially find love with different partners is a sort of genre meta-trope that exists across subgenres. You get it in historical with sprawling aristocratic clans. You get it in small-town contemporaries with no-less-sprawling modern families. You even get it in paranormals with shadowy brotherhoods of vampires, werewolves, or other supernatural beings.
But you don’t get it in mainstream media.
It’s true that with the advent of streaming dividing television up into tens of thousands of tiny laser-targeted microaudiences TV has had room to become more experimental, and there are shows that definitely do break up the usual formulas of serial television. There are anthology shows like American Horror Story where each edition is a new story with a new cast of characters. There’s procedural crime shows like The Sinner where each new season is a new case in a new context and only the detective is constant. But there has never, as far as I know, been a TV show that has tried to do that quintessentially genre romance structure of “consistent cast of characters, each one gets a one-season love story in which they are the main character” and I was genuinely intrigued to see how they were going to handle it.
It turns out the answer was “well… it’s complicated”.
Part Two: Desperately Seeking Simon
I was genuinely confused when the announcement came out that Regé-Jean Page wasn’t coming back for season two of Bridgerton.
But unlike much of the rest of the internet, what confused me wasn’t that he wouldn’t be reprising the role of Simon Basset, it was that anybody realistically expected that he would.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved his turn as Simon in the first series. I would have thought it was great to see him come back in season two. But I could completely understand why an actor who had played the romantic lead in a highly successful TV drama in 2020 wouldn’t necessarily be super-duper keen to come back and play the romantic lead’s sister’s husband in a drama in 2022.
Also, looking at his IMDB page, apparently his next major project is the new Dungeons and Dragons movie and I am fucking here for it.
Regé-Jean-Pagegate highlighted, for me, one of the first big problems of adapting the Bridgerton-style family romance for modern serial television. One of the huge draws of that kind of series, for people who are used to the genre, is that once you’ve read character A’s love story in book one (or, I suppose, in Bridgerton’s case, read character D’s love story in book one with character A’s story being reserved for book two) you get to then see character A and character A’s love interest being happily enrelationshipped (usually married, but not always, it depends on subgenre) in the background of character B’s story.
And in a book series, you can do that. Because in a book series, not to put too fine a point on it, none of your characters are real people with careers to think about. A fictional duke is always going to be free to nip over to Aubrey Hall for a quick game of Pall Mall any time the plot demands it. A real actor, not so much.
The thing is, although I hadn’t really expected Simon and Daphne to come back for season two of Bridgerton (they’re only in one scene in the book, after all) I did definitely notice that he wasn’t there. Part of this is that while the Duke and Duchess of Hastings only really pop up once in the second Bridgerton novel, Daphne is in the second series of the show quite a lot, even having major plot-critical discussions with Antony about his marriage prospects. And there does come a point where the fact that she keeps showing up solo gets… notable. Especially because a huge part of the way the Bridgerton family is characterised in both the books and the show is that they don’t have the “technically married but live very separate lives” thing you might expect from typical aristocrats. And especially especially because in the first series you kind of got the impression that Simon and Antony were really good mates, so Simon’s absence in Antony’s moments of romantic and personal crisis really stands out.
Simon’s disappearance from Season 2 really does highlight a problem in converting the big-romance-family story structure to a medium where not everybody is going to want to come back and be in the background of another person’s love story. And the structure of Season 2 of Bridgerton does, I think, represent a genuine attempt to fix that problem. It’s just that fixing that problem involves switching things up in a way that neither TV viewers nor book readers were expecting.
Part Three: Romancing the Duke Who Loved An Offer From Sir Phillip When He Was On The Way To His Kiss
There are eight Bridgerton novels. There are probably going to be eight series of Bridgerton.
Whenever a TV show comes out that’s based on a book, you get timely articles released on all the usual pop-culture tracking sites with titles like “Ten Ways Series [X] Of [Thing You Like] Is Different From The Book!” and depending on the book and the show they’re sometimes quite interesting and sometimes they’re missing the elephant in the room.
For the first series of Bridgerton, those lists were quite interesting because when you got right down to it, the first series of Bridgerton was a pretty straight adaptation of The Duke and I. So if you wanted to write a listicle about book/show differences you had plenty of grist for your mill. You could go through the whole series and say “this bit is from the book, this bit isn’t, this bit kind of is, this bit is from a future book” and overall the two pieces of media were close enough that the comparison was reasonably meaningful.
For the second series of Bridgerton, every “ten differences” listicle should have begun “1: It’s a completely different story structured completely differently for a different medium with different expectations” and then just continued with “2-10: see 1.”
Unlike Regé-Jean Page, Jonathan Bailey and Simone Ashley are scheduled to come back for season three. More specifically, they’re coming back, and pretty much every news article that’s announced that they’re coming back is making that announcement with a quote from Simone Ashley which says “Kate and Anthony are just getting started”.
And I don’t think that’s spin. I think that’s literally true.
I mean obviously it’s also spin. This is one of the biggest shows on television and I’m sure everybody involved with it is very, very careful what they say to the press. But it’s spin that sums up exactly what works about Season 2 of Bridgerton and exactly what confused everybody about it.
The first season of Bridgerton was a pretty straightforward adaptation of The Duke & I. Yes, it deviates from the book considerably (the whole bit with the prince who is also, let’s not forget, Vigilante from Peacemaker and I love it is show-original) but ultimately it does tell the whole of Simon and Daphne’s story more or less exactly as it appears in the novel. It even has an epilogue in which she’s giving birth to their first child and they’re joyfully agreeing to continue the Bridgerton tradition of alphabetical naming. By the end of S1E8, Simon and Daphne’s story is absolutely, one hundred percent, definitely, done.
Which is … kind of probably a big part of why it didn’t really make sense for Regé-Jean Page to come back for season two?
The second season of Bridgerton, by contrast, is much more strongly an ensemble-focused light-hearted costume drama that is loosely united around a central story that is… kind of inspired by the first half of The Viscount Who Loved Me.
And I do get that there are people who are annoyed at the changes. I get that there are people who want to know what happened to the bee scene, I get that a whole lot of people miss the red hot Bridgerton sex, I get that the pacing of Anthony and Kate’s relationship felt incredibly weird to a lot of people (it did to me right up until the final episode). But the more I think about it the more I think all of that makes sense when you look carefully at the ways in which a visual-medium series in which each character is portrayed by a living human being is different from a written-medium series in which all the characters exist only in one person’s imagination.
I’ll admit that this might just be me reasoning in a circle and thinking myself into a corner, but I’m increasingly convinced that while the straight-adaptation, very intense romance, strong focus on the central couple strategy was exactly the right thing for the first series of Bridgerton, it would have simply become unsustainable as the show went on.
In a book series, for an audience that is used to the conventions of the genre, sure, you can sell people on couple A (okay, D) in the first book, then ask them to invest in couple B (or A) in the second book and C (or B) in the third. But television just doesn’t work that way.
The absence of Regé-Jean Page was a disappointment for everybody but I suspect that people who came to Bridgerton from a romance reading background were disappointed for a subtly different reason than people who came to the series from a TV background. To a romance audience, the disappointment is that you don’t get the callback to the first story, you don’t get to see Simon and Daphne in their happy ending, to be reminded that love is real and that happy ever after really does continue ever after.
To the TV audience, the disappointment is that the expectation set up by the first season of the show is that it was, on a fundamental level, about Simon and Daphne. But their story was definitely over in the first series. What TV audiences missed was specifically their intense sexual chemistry, their looks of naked carnal longing, and Regé-Jean Page licking a spoon. And none of that was coming back anyway.
But Kate and Anthony are just getting started. Like they’re literally just getting started. They won’t be the focus of the next series, or the series after, or the series after that, but they’ll still have story to tell because while series one of Bridgerton basically adapted the first book, it feels a lot like series 2-8 are intending to adapt all of the other books in a more complex and overlapping way.
Part Four: You Can Type This Shit, George, But You Sure Can’t Say It
I hesitated to use this subheading because I appreciate it sounds disparaging. For those who aren’t aware of the context, it’s something that Harrison Ford said to George Lucas on the original set of Star Wars. It was actually, in context, almost certainly a joke, an actor who wasn’t especially experienced with the tropes of science fiction making a flippant complaint about the difficulty of knowing how to deliver lines like “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs”. But I’ve also always liked it as a pithy, if somewhat aggressive, summary of the differences between written and performed media.
Because actually, books are full of shit you can type but sure can’t say. And let’s be clear, I include my own books in that. Books are books. TV is TV. Movies are movies. Theatre is theatre. What works in one doesn’t work in the other.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there are no bad adaptations. Of course sometimes adaptations make changes for bad reasons—to pander to an audience they underestimate, to placate censors who would pay less attention to a less popular medium, because the people making the adaptation didn’t actually understand the text they were adapting.
But a lot of the time, it’s none of those things. A lot of the time, an awful lot of the time, it’s because they’re taking out something you can type but you sure can’t say.
Towards the end of the second season of Bridgerton I found myself having two distinct, contradictory thoughts in very quick succession. The first was “you know, I really like Eloise and Benedict’s relationship” and the second was “hang on a second, I think they’ve only ever had three conversations.”
And I’ll admit I didn’t go back and check. I’m not keeping a score of how many times individual Bridgerton characters talk to each other. But what I did realise was that my sense that Eloise and Benedict had a good relationship that I liked came entirely from the fact that every time they have had a significant conversation it has been at night, sitting on the swings, with Eloise sitting on the right and Benedict coming in to sit on the vacant swing on the left. It’s very, very, very specific.
That, my friends, is the power of visual storytelling. In a little under sixteen hours of TV these two characters have shared probably less than ten minutes of total screen time, but the scenes they do share are framed so carefully that my eyes tell my brain to fill in the blanks, and it obligingly fills in a whole brother-sister relationship that never actually has to be on the screen at all.
But while visual storytelling enables some narrative beats that you can’t pull off in a written medium, it also has a tendency to make others fall flat.
Which brings us to the bee scene and the sex.
In the book The Viscount Who Loved Me, Kate and Anthony are married by halfway through. This, amongst other things, allows them to do proper Bridgerton-fucking for the other half of the book while Anthony grapples with his unshakeable belief in his own impending doom and Kate learns to accept that Anthony really is into her and isn’t just constantly wishing she was her sister.
But the reason they get married is specifically that they’re in the garden of Aubrey Hall after the Pall Mall game, and Kate is stung on the chest by a bee, and Anthony has so much residual trauma from his father’s death that he’s convinced this will kill her and tries to suck the poison out, meaning that he’s caught by multiple witnesses with his lips on Kate’s boobs and so he has to marry her or else she will be ruined.
This does kind of work in the book. But it kind of works in the book for reasons that are very strongly book specific. Firstly you’re in Antony’s head a lot of the time so the intensity and irrationality of his bee-fear is made a lot more explicit, while in the show you get a very strong sense that he’s carrying a lot of residual baggage because of his father’s sudden death but it’s a lot less, shall we say, bee-centric. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the books do a very good job of establishing expectations and signalling to a savvy reader the kinds of tropes and beats you can expect. And let’s face it, “you were caught in a compromising situation for slightly contrived reasons so now you must marry” is a classic for a reason.
The problem is that it’s a classic that’s also used in the first book.
In a written medium, that’s not a problem. Genre readers are generally likely to read widely within their genre, to be comfortable with tropes and be used to seeing the same ones more than once. But for a TV audience? That’s different. If you’re a TV viewer Bridgerton is relatively likely to be the only historical thing you’ve watched full stop. Worse, you’re also pretty likely to have done a rewatch of the first series directly before watching the second series. A repeated plot beat like that would stand out a mile.
In a book series, having two consecutive stories in which the hero and the heroine have to get married at the half-way point because they’re caught in a compromising position in a garden is fine. On TV I can’t help but think it would have looked really, really weird.
But of course that does mean you miss out on the Bridgerton sex scenes. Hell the reason “you have to get married for an, if we’re honest, slightly contrived reason” is a trope of the lighter kind of histrom in the first place is precisely because extra-marital sex is so socially taboo in the era that you kind of have to get the hero and heroine married if you want them to bang at all.
So I suspect the showrunners were caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place. And on balance I think they picked the right rock. Choosing to tell a slower-paced story in S2 might have jarred the audience initially, but at least it signalled that not every series was going to follow the same pattern, and on balance sacrificing the banging was probably a price worth paying. If every season was just a relentlessly single-focus story about the season’s chosen couple, the series could easily have put itself into a death spiral. Every season they’d have to build up a new couple, get them married early enough to have at least three episodes of wanton rumpy-pumpy and then, next season, ditch the people the audience liked to move on to somebody else but also try to somehow persuade the actors to stick around after they’ve already had the biggest story beats they’ll ever get.
And maybe they could have made that work. But I can completely see why they took things in a different direction.
Part Five: The Hero With A Thousand Faces
There is, I think, another reason that the showrunners of Bridgerton decided to effectively spin out the first half of the plot of The Viscount Who Loved Me for the whole season and that’s because the second half of the book is based almost entirely on Anthony and Kate’s personal internal conflicts and those conflicts are very grounded in who they are as characters. But who they are as characters in the book is actually very, very different from who they are as characters in the show.
And for Kate, since she only exists in season two, that’s very much a self-contained problem. For Anthony though, it’s more interesting, and I think highlights another unique challenge of translating this kind of story from one medium to another.
One of the coolest things about written fiction, especially about multi-viewpoint serial fiction, is that you have, well viewpoints. What’s normal to one character is outlandish to another. A character one person sees as a close friend another will see as a deadly enemy. And in romance, and most relevantly to these first two series of Bridgerton, a character one person sees as a beloved if slightly overbearing brother, another character will see as an indescribably handsome, sexually intimidating but darkly seductive rakehell.
But the thing is, on TV, you kind of only get to cast one actor, and that actor has to give a consistent performance.
A huge part of what made Season 1 of Bridgerton so explosive was… well… I’m going to go back to spoon-licking, because it’s iconic for a reason. Simon was every inch the male lead. He radiated sex, basically constantly, to the extent that he was literally going down on the cutlery. But the thing is, like the mid-season-compromising-position-in-a-garden trick you kind of only get to do that once. In the books, the Anthony of The Viscount Who Loved Me is every bit as much of a bad boy sex machine as the Simon of The Duke & I and it’s completely fine because books are written media and written media have viewpoint characters and obviously the book one version of Anthony isn’t presented as the kind of man who can make women wet by breathing near them because we only ever see him from the PoV of a male friend and his actual sister.
TV doesn’t work like that. We see Anthony in series one through the neutral lens of a film camera and we see him, ultimately, as a kind if somewhat overbearing man who cares deeply for his family. Who yearns for an escape but feels the bonds of his duty and his birthright keenly. He has a mistress, certainly, but he genuinely cares for her, and is hurt when she rejects him. If in the second season he pivoted to full alpha hero mode, eating out the tableware and wielding his sexuality as a weapon, it would have felt completely out of left field.
But this makes Anthony’s latter book arc unworkable on TV. You can’t have a reforming-a-rake arc when he’s not really a rake to begin with. And show!Anthony might be a bit high-handed at times but he’s nowhere near enough of an alpha jerk to convince himself that he shouldn’t love his wife because he might die young.
If Season Two of Bridgerton had stuck to the pacing of the book plot, sure we’d have had more fucking, but there would have been essentially no conflict in the second half of the season. Show!Anthony just isn’t the kind of guy to still be acting all no-I-shall-never-love-you after he’s married and since he’s very very rich, she’s very very sensible, and they’re both clearly super in love and super hot for each other, episodes 5-8 would just have been Kate and Anthony having good sex and being happy which would be cool to watch for a while but couldn’t really carry half a series of event television.
Part Six: In Which This Author Reaches a Conclusion
Season one of Bridgerton made me wonder what the hell they were going to do and then season two made me wonder what the hell they were doing, right up to the final episode where I had a lightbulb moment and saw how it all fit together.
The glib, summarised way I’d express it is this.
Series One was a direct adaptation of a single book into a single series of television. This was the right way to make a big splashy impact but wasn’t sustainable and created clear problems which season two inherited, most notable amongst them the absence of Regé-Jean Page (although even if he’d been there, it’s not liked he’d be able to lick any more spoons, he’s married now and his spoon-licking needs to be kept strictly within matrimony). To make the series work long-term, series two needed to represent a kind of course correction from being a set of standalone adaptations of stories that wouldn’t, if adapted independently, work cohesively in a television medium, into something that is more explicitly an ensemble drama in which the core narrative of the original stories provides a kind of framing device around which the whole thing is structured.
What I suspect, going forward, is that while each season will keep the core structure and pairing of the books there will be an increasing emphasis on setting up future stories and on continuing past stories, much as—for example—the saga of Lady Whisledown’s identity continued more or less straight over two seasons. We’re already in a situation where, for example, Penelope and Colin’s story has had explicit setup that has been building for two seasons (and may build for one more if they keep to book-order for the adaptation) and I’m fully expecting to get the next stage of Kate and Anthony’s relationship in Season 3 even if their story isn’t the primary focus. And I’m looking forward to it because while it had a slow build it did also wind up being super hot.
You do lose something by having the stories play out like this. By letting a single love story overspill the boundaries of its season (incidentally my favourite device in the whole of Bridgerton is the way they say “season” in a way that is clearly intended to have a double meaning as “social season” and “season of television”) you get a less self-contained, less intense and, assuming they more or less limit their characters to only boinking within or on the cusp of marriage, less rapacious story.
But you also, I think, get something a whole lot more interesting.
First, wanton rumpy-pumpyis forever in my head and making me smile. I love it. Second, I will show any of my friends that argue the 2nd season was lesser than the 1st season. I wholeheartedly agree of your book to TV translation thoughts..ot is how I feel but much more eloquent.
Totally get what you’re saying. I just binged these last week starting with Season 2 and working backward. (Sometimes it’s fun trying to understand the relationships without knowing their backstory.) I’m curious if my non-Romance reading friends will notice the difference between seasons 1 and 2. One of the nice things about Bridgerton is that they now understand when I talk about a plot with the caught in a compromising position and now have to marry trope.
I think I’m fine too anal to ever start a series at season 2. Like, I think it would genuinely mess with my head.
It’s always slightly weird to me to see mainstream reactions to genre tropes – not just romance, but in general. Like when the 90s boy wizard book got big and everyone was like “I can’t believe children’s fiction can be like this” even though children’s fiction has always been like that.
This analysis was really useful. I have nothing insightful to add beyond my undying love and appreciation for Nicola Coughlan, but I really appreciate the time you take to think about media and then write about it in a very structured and completely accessible way.
I am either not one for visual cues or I’m just generally oblivious, so I find it hard to pick out structure and narrative devices in film as opposed to written media, so this really helped!
Returning to Bridgerton, the fact that Colin and Penelope are already a storyline from season one makes me slightly worried that they won’t get their own season but their story will be fitted in around the others whenever there’s a bit of space to fill. I really hope that doesn’t happen.
I can’t remember if this was also a feature of the books, but is there an explanation for the 180 degree turn in Violet Bridgerton’s character between seasons one and two? I mean she went from a woman who wouldn’t explain the most basic elements of sexual relations to her daughter who she was trying to marry off to a very relaxed and cool mother who understands her child better that he does himself. I really hope that this is a permanent change and she won’t revert back once the child she’s trying to marry off is a daughter again.
Her friendship with Lady Danbury though. <3
I think Colin and Penelope are actually next season – although there’s been a certain amount of fan outrage at them not following the book order exactly (because, I think, technically it should be Benedict next).
Please put too much store by my analyses of visual media, there’s a reason I don’t work in it, and honestly I had a YouTube video to tell me how to understand the filmography of Se7en which I understand is basically movie making 101.
In terms of Lady B I do agree it’s a bit agreed. Honestly, the whole “didn’t teach her daughter how sex works” thing even during S1 felt a little bit plot-necessitated, especially because an episode previously she was being all cool mom about the fact she assumes that Daphne and Simon are already banging.
But I do enjoy her and Lady Danbury very much.
Interesting insights, thanks! I haven’t actually watched season 2 yet, but this helps me understand some of the griping I’ve been seeing.
Lainey Gossip has some great deep-dives on both seasons of Bridgerton, which echo your point on the visual resonance/ storytelling aspect where they focus particularly on fashion and the use of color. In case you’re interested. That site is generally quite good for PhD-level celebrity studies.
And at the risk of sounding ungrateful for this entirely free, insightful content 😊, I must admit I am crossing fingers you’ll feel moved to bless us with an OFMD deep-dive once you’ve had the chance to see it. The main reason I haven’t done Bridgerton 2 yet is that I can’t stop rewatching OFMD, which has scratched my tv romance itch better than anything in years. Am super curious to hear your thoughts on it (uh, again, apologizing for being a demanding internet person adding to your burden of unpaid labor!).
Oh, repeat viewing of Our Flag Means Death is also the reason I’ve only watched two eps of Bridgerton! Glad it’s not just me.
I think the blog at this point is mostly stubbornness because blogging has been dying as a medium since the demise of LJ. I’m hoping in about a decade it’ll come back round and all the cool kids will be doing it again in a kind of retro way.
I am really looking forward to seeing OFMD. It’s hard to know if I’ll have anything to say about it because I don’t always (shock horror). Besides, I have ever Jane Austen Ever to write about so the blog is kind of full for the foreseeable.
I’m a lover of romance fiction in pretty much all genres, and regency is a fave (m/m mostly, so I haven’t read Bridgerton, despite a hint of m/m in season 1), and so as a viewer only, season 1 and 2 are perfectly cohesive to me.
I missed Regé-Jean Page because I’m only human, but it didn’t jar because I wasn’t expecting him. And because I ADORE Nicola Coughlan and she talked about ‘her’ future season (idek if she’s joking) I kind of expected a different member of the main cast to be the focus each season, especially, as you mention, because all we romance readers are used to this form of serialisation.
So my only expectations were that it was as gorgeous and enjoyable to watch as Season one and if anything it was more so, and for me, the slow build-up was more enjoyable than a bonkathon.
As always your thoughts make me think, so thank you.
For what it’s worth, there’s definitely no m/m in Bridgerton (the books). There’s also no Black people. They’re very trad m/f Regency from the early 2000s and they’re really good examples of that thing but that thing is not necessarily the thing that romance readers used to more diverse, less heteronormative dynamics will be used to. The show is very, very, very different.
For what it’s worth, I do think they’ll keep the focus-on-a-single-love story aspect of the book series, but I think it’ll take place in the context of a broader ensemble piece. So basically I think where we were at the end of S2 will be the pattern going forward.
I suspect you’re going to get a crap ton of comments on this blog entry, so I will join the masses in sharing my thoughts and making your review queue really long. I haven’t read any of the Bridgerton books, but have watched both seasons. I think that is probably the better way to do it (although one doesn’t always have a choice in which order these things happen). I watched Normal People on Hulu, never having read any of Rooney’s books, and I found the show really entrancing. I know people have definite *feelings* about that adaptation, but I was blissfully unaware and able to enjoy the show on its own depressing and beautiful merits. I’ve now read her other two books (not Normal People though, I imagine I will be doing a lot of yelling in my head when I do), and I see Conversations With Friends is coming out on Hulu soon, so we’ll see if I can be a good person and separate the book and the TV version, because as your blog says, you really have to. They are such different platforms for telling a story, things have to be constructed, and deconstructed, and all the things, to tell the core story in the best way possible for the medium. I appreciate your meta approach to examining it, being able to distance oneself from “hot topics” is a special gift.
Of particular interest are your thoughts on Anthony’s character arc. I found the show entertaining and the actors charming, but I was having some minor internal wrestlings about his character, or rather the way it was being presented by the production and the actor. It felt, inconsistent, maybe is the word? Some high silliness at times, paired with steamy spots, then angst, I couldn’t quite place my finger on what I was feeling. I think now, in part, I was trying to fit him into the rake mold set by season 1, as you point out. But, also, the scene he had with his mother in the last episode (?) ultimately got me, and helped link his character’s progression together. And boy am I sucker for actors that play emotional scenes with restraint, that try not to show ALL the emotions, but rather show the fight against their feelings. It’s so much more powerful than chewing up the scenery and I thought both actors did a tremendous job with that scene. The actor that plays the mom, by the way, is so great. It’s kind of a thankless role, with all that hot young love raining around her, and she just kills it. Great specific and often subtle choices. Very nice. Oh, and, of course appreciated (on many levels) the Darcy pond moment that we romance lovers were, er, spoon-fed.
Okay, wow, this is almost as long as your blog, apparently I had a lot of thoughts. And since I’m doing this on my phone, I have no real concept of how long it actually is, so I’m sure I will be mortified when it shows up in the comments. Yay!
PS-I can’t believe you respond to basically EVERY comment on you blog. That is impossibly kind and generous.
Yes, I am indeed amazing. Seriously though, a blog is a really strange choice of medium these days, so I appreciate that people do actually take the time to read and comment – and, consequently, it feels only to polite to read and comment back.
I do get where you’re coming from with the portrayal in Anthony with BS2, but I think the actor had a lot of heavy lifting to do. Because he had to take a character who, as I vaguely point out in the original post, was basically “heroine’s overbearing brother” in S1 and transition him to “tormented romantic lead” in S2 at the same time that the series was transitioning from “intense single focus adaptation of a romance novel” to “ensemble costume drama with strong romantic elements.” I also suspect some of the consistency issues come from, well, the inconsistency between Book Anthony and Show Anthony. The thing about Show Simon is that he’s basically Book Simon, whereas Show Anthony is really quite a different character but has to have at least some elements of Book Anthony’s plot.
I do think Jonathan Bailey did an excellent job of smoothing a lot of this over but I think it took a full season to do the smoothing.
I agree, I think Bailey did succeed in the end, despite having a tough and complicated role to tackle. I mean, he had ME holding back tears while HE was holding back tears, so I was obviously in to it. Also, he has had a place in my heart ever since Crashing. Which I should rewatch, it’s been awhile.
P.S. After I posted my original comment, I realized that by complimenting you on your blog responsiveness I was 1) basically forcing you to comment on my post and 2) going to make you feel awkward about the compliment. So, uh, sorry about that. I take it back. Not really, but kind of.
I absolutely agree that the TV adaptation is turning-out to be more interesting. It seems the writers in Shondaland are having fun being able to more fully develop the characters’ backstory (like Eloise, Pen, Colin, Benedict, etc.) before their season, which totally excites me as a reader, as the Colin/Pen slow burn seems more intense on screen, drawn out over the first two seasons so far. I can’t wait to see how this slow burn further develops next season.
What I’m curious to know is how they’re going to fit Francesca’s season into this TV formula, as most of the characters in her book have not been introduced in the TV show yet, and I doubt that they’re going to toss-out the established and loved TV cast (at the risk of sounding dramatic, how will we survive a season without Lady Danbury?!) in order to tell her story remotely how it was presented in the book, which is arguably the hottest Bridgerton book by a large margin. Even more than that, how will they present John and Michael in a way that demonstrates that they were both right for her AND that it is ok that John and Michael happen to be related to each other?! Needless to say, Francesca’s story (much like the bee sting scene in The Viscount Who Loved Me) cannot be presented the same way as it was in the book in a way that it makes sense to the audience. With that said, I can’t wait to watch it play-out on screen (if they make it that far).
I will confess that I haven’t read the whole Bridgerton series. I’m interested in what it’s doing, and how it relates to the show, but it’s not the sort of romance I’m naturally drawn to.
Also, from your description, I briefly thought Francesca’s story was a polyam setup and am now a bit disappointed that it isn’t.
The thing that’s actually interesting me in terms of adaptations/casting is that if they keep to roughly one season a year, some of the actors are going to be really young by the time their spotlight season rolls around. And, yes, technically they’ll be about the same age that their characters would be in the books but I think we’d have all felt a bit uncomfortable had Daphne Bridgerton been played by an actual twenty-one year old.
First – thank you so much for your reply! It has made my day.
That’s fair – the Bridgerton TV show was actually my introduction into the romance genre (except for Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters), which was why I read all of them. Since then, I have found your work, which personally makes me feel seen as a reader on more levels than I can adequately express. Seriously, I cannot get enough of your work, and I cannot wait to devour A Lady for a Duke! Thank you for sharing your writing with the world! 😀
Now that you mention it, I would have rather enjoyed a polyam setup in Francesca’s story (assuming John and Michael aren’t related in that storyline), and I think it would have fit quite well with their dynamic.
It will certainly be interesting to see how they handle the younger cast when its time for their romantic storylines – I wonder if they will choose to either wait longer between seasons to allow the cast to age, or switch the younger actors for older ones.
I still haven’t watched S2 of Bridgerton, though your thoughts here make me want to (more than I had before). I think I was the only one who felt kinda meh about all the boning in the second half of S1; the suggestion that S2 is a little more slow burn-y is appealing to me.
I know you said in an earlier comment (prev blog post) that the UK will get the Queer Pirates With Unexpected Feelings show at the end of the month, so I’ll just echo what others have already said above — I’m very curious as to what you’ll think. One of the reasons why I’ve put off watching this season of Bridgerton is because last season felt rather ruthlessly straight, and after watching OFMD, I just don’t want str8 shows anymore. Like, how does one go back to that after something as unapologetically queer as Our Flag Means Death? It’s a conundrum!
I have complicated feelings about queerness in mainstream media. Obviously, representation is good and I’m glad we’ve kind of got past the point where you could only have queer stories in stuff that’s all about Being Queer TM. Like, I read quite an interesting article recently about the gay character in The Gilded Age and that article’s take was, to paraphrase, “this crap is character is crap, one-dimensional and boring and I didn’t care, and that made me really happy because it made realise that we’re now at a stage where a show can have a crap, one dimensional boring queer character and it doesn’t break my heart because it’s the only rep I’ve got.”
When it comes specifically to Bridgerton I’m not sure how best to articulate this but I kind of strongly come down on “I’d rather it remained unapologetically straight.” If nothing else, I don’t want to do a season with a same sex relationship and for mass media to talk as if it’s the first same sex relationship in a romance thing (which it inevitably will). Like, it’s not really my place to have an opinion on this as a white person but it does already slightly bug me that Bridgerton (the book series) kind of gets held up as an example of romance diverse on the strength of the casting in the TV series.
Yes, exactly — when queer rep feels like it’s done bc the writers et al. are trying to check some Diversity Points Boxes to Get The Gays On Board or whatever, it shows, and to me it never feels especially good. To that end, I would also rather Bridgerton remain unapologetically straight, pretty much for that reason. So for the next little while, at least, I think I’ll stick with queer stories by queer folks, yk?
(I actually love that Cousin Oscar from TGA is both gay and a shit. And yes, maybe it is partly because he’s not the only gay on the shows anymore — like, we can have queer people be jerks and characters you want to throttle, and that’s okay! ::throws glitter:: Progress?)
This is great timing because I just watched this season yesterday (speed-watching it with a migraine), and your post crystallized a lot of things that I was still kind of vaguely puzzling out. I had been wondering how the show was going to cope with the rotating-main-characters issue, and with the amount of time that passes between some of the books – by the time Eloise and Penelope get their own books, they’re 28, and that’s only the middle of the series. But I thought it was a weird choice to address it by essentially eliminating the plot of the second book, which is probably the best book in the series.
I mean, “hero is a weirdo control freak who’s obsessed with bees and his own mortality” is an odd and not particularly sexy character motivation, but it works in the book, partly because we get to spend a lot of time in Anthony’s head, and partly because it’s such a counterpoint to his rakish reputation. Not all of that would work in the show, but in taking it out, they take out a lot of the emotional stakes for Anthony and Kate. No bee scene and no thunderstorm scene means that two of the major dramatic moments of the story are just not there, and the show doesn’t replace them with much of anything. So it all feels a bit flat, and as you said, the pacing is off. So I kept thinking: would it really be so bad to have every season follow the same classic romance-novel structure? Would the audience really object to three episodes of sexual tension –> sudden marriage –> banging –> misunderstanding –> near-death experience –> reconciliation, eight seasons in a row? Couldn’t that repetition take on the soothing familiarity of a bedtime story told in exactly the right order?
But I missed the actor problem until you pointed it out. And I think that’s the part that makes it really impossible.
I think the show, if it wanted to, could train its audience to be more like an audience of romance readers. Doctor Who trained its audience to accept a new companion every couple of years and a new Doctor every four years or so, so cast turnover isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker. And seeding a show with clues that a minor character has a major story waiting to happen – as you said, that’s harder to do on screen, but not impossible. In theory, everyone the audience wants to write fanfic about could be someone they want to watch a decently-written season about. Inherent sexiness is important, sure, but you can carry an audience a long way on the sense that a character has an unmet need. (I’m thinking about the show Angel, for instance, which transforms Wesley from a whiny nerd into a ruggedly sexy jerk who treats people badly to compensate for feeling like a whiny nerd, and in doing so makes him into the antihero of the third and fourth seasons. Or – and I’m sorry to put you next to Joss Whedon, it’s purely accidental – I just read your book For Real, and I would happily read a story about Dom the dom, not because I find him particularly attractive or have a passionate interest in the alto sax, but because Dom wants something that he doesn’t have.)
But the leads of Season X not wanting to come back to live happily ever after in the background of Season X+1, X+2, etc. – that there’s absolutely no getting around. And it does make sense that they would want to delay the second half of Anthony’s story so as to keep him around. The problem, as far as I’m concerned, is that in doing so they kind of took out the first half as well.
I should repeat what I said in response to an earlier comment, which is please take what I say with a pinch of salt because my knowledge of visual media falls somewhere between “jack” and “shit.”
You might be right that a TV can train an audience to accept things that they wouldn’t accept otherwise but I think doing that probably involves making certain commercial sacrifices. For example, I think New Who benefited a lot from having forty odd years of precedent for the Doctor regenerating every now and again, and having a rotating cast of companions, and even then there was quite a lot of backlash to Christopher Eccleston only doing one season. In fact, thinking about it, there’s a certain similarity between the way New Who ripped that bandaid off early and the way S2 Bridgerton doubled down hard on “we’re not doing that much sex every season” as soon as possible.
PS – Dom is getting his own book 😉
So happy to get your take on Bridgerton! I was curious to hear your thoughts. I didn’t consider the repeated plot as an issue, but that’s such a good point! I guess they did have to take a sharp turn from the book. Overall I really loved this season. It’s such a perfect escape from everything going on.
I have read the first 5 books so am watching knowing the source material. I didn’t miss Simon as much because I adore Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony and Simone Ashley’s Kate together and I really love Anthony’s book. Their smoldering sarcastic banter gave me life. And I liked that Daphne was still part of it. I thought the adaptation was good, especially the Pall Mall game, until episode 6 when they actually went through with the wedding and then Edwina was the one to make the decisions for everyone else. I found it very excruciating and was expecting Kate & Anthony to marry instead!
My other issue is that I thought there were too many “almost kiss” moments when in the book they make out in Anthony’s study way before the bee scene. I love a slow burn, but would have liked them to come together earlier than the very last 15 minutes. 🙂 But the ending we did get was incredibly romantic and I loved the production design and costumes and how they brought it all to life. I realize it can’t be a 1:1 perfect match from book:show and I think I just enjoyed what they presented to us. Visually it’s just so gorgeous – how Kate starts off wearing blue then teal then lavender and purple then tangerine at the end as she warms up fully to him is so so good.
But I agree I think they need to overlap the stories to keep it interesting for the show moving forward. They definitely did plant seeds for Colin & Benedicts stories. I’m also hoping they combine them in S3 so it doesn’t get too tedious with aligning perfectly to a single book’s story. Because we already know that Pen is Lady Whistledown and there will also need to be a time jump? And Kate is very present for Penelope in Book 4.
Also, I really enjoyed Lady Danbury and Lady Bridgerton scheming and chatting together, they were really fun to watch
Note: Regé is in an Audi commercial campaign here which is funny to see the Duke of Hastings shilling cars.
It’s a sad indictment of the state of the British aristocracy that the Duke of Hastings is now selling Audis.
I can see why, if you had very strong positive feelings about the book, you’d feel let down by the show. And I do agree that the slow burn doesn’t entirely work, although in my case I mostly just felt bad for Edwina. And I didn’t actually mind her making decisions for everyone at the point she did, because until then everyone had been making decisions for her. I think also the kind of audience Bridgerton is going for probably isn’t the kind of audience that would accept “whether Edwina marries Anthony” as anything other than Edwina’s decision. Like, because it’s so self-consciously modern that very historical-fictiony setup of marrying a guy you don’t necessarily want to marry because of duty would probably have fallen flat.
My main beef with the changes from the book are the changes they made to Edwina’s storyline. In the book, she wasn’t particularly enamoured with Anthony, and her relationship with Kate remained strong throughout. I found the proposal and the entire wedding episode excruciating – I watched from behind a pillow as though I was watching a horror movie when the killer is clearly inside the house!
I agree that it’s good that they gave Edwina agency at the very least after everything they put her through, but I wish her character didn’t have to go through all that, in particular the damage to her relationship with Kate. I was sad when she wasn’t in the final Pall Mall scene. I hope she gets a storyline in season 3, and that she finds love, and more importantly, that we see her relationship with Kate fully healed.
Haha. You’re funny. Oh I did love the show just have some minor quibbles about pacing. I think Edwina is the show’s MVP having found agency and figuring stuff out for her sister. I think they’re trying to add some feminist takes to the characters which I like (i.e. Eloise).
Is Colin & Penelope’s story next? God I love them. I haven’t read much extra stuff about the show.
This all makes a lot of sense – I was curious how they’d deal with all the time the book spends in Anthony’s head. I enjoyed both books and show, for the record, but I did have one annoyance: in the books, one thing that characterizes the Bridgerton family is their lack of scandals, and later in the series the scandals in which they are embroiled are directly related to a justified love story (e.g., Benedict, Gregory). But the TV show thrust them directly into a major scandal of their own making, from which they escape by the skin of their teeth. This paints the family so differently from the books. Naturally, they are different anyway – the dearth of snarky banter between Simon and Daphne was another thing I missed – but this is a major difference in which Violet seems more conniving and the family is more vulnerable. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I think part of the problem they were adapting around is related to not re-using the same plot beats and keeping Anthony’s character consistent. The books were written over twenty years ago (always a staggering realization to me) and I think there’s been a real evolution in the romance genre away from every hero having the same “I must withhold some crucial part of my love and affection because I am such a tortured alpha male who suffered [something kind of contrived] in my dark past.” Book Simon and Book Anthony are both of that type, and so not only would the plot be similar, but the emotional arcs would also be similar. Show Anthony’s problem seems to be more he’s a know-it-all who can’t admit he’s made a mistake, which is a different kind of alpha hero.
I don’t like the books any more and I don’t watch the show and I still enjoyed reading this!