But through the climate crises, assassinations, near wars, global health emergencies, economic depressions, race riots, collective wokeness and vitriolic partisanship, I think we can all agree the one true winner of 2020 was Netflix.
*pause for sweeping choral music*
There has not been a day this year where I haven’t spent at least an hour swiping down boxes of content suggestions so specific I could swear the Netflix algorithms hacked my soul. Acceptable genres like “Witty procedural dramas with empowered female leads” lead inevitably into darker tunnels: “Period piece marital dramas,” “political tear jerker,” “The Best of Barbra,” “Cerebral Scandinavian TV comedies,” and, after only a single viewing of the classic The Women (1939), “Grandma’s Night In with the Gals”.
To be honest I’ve never been ashamed of my inner grandmother or her gals, which is only one of the reasons I bloomed with joy when I found the show Bridgerton.
Fellow connoisseurs of “Emotionally Manipulative Primetime Dramas” will no doubt know of Shonda Rhimes, the mind behind the melodramatic indulgences like Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal. If you’ve seen any of these shows you already know Shondaland (her eponymous production company) is responsible for some of the most addictive television since 2005. After conquering popular culture on cable (#McDreamy), Netflix lured her to the internet with a mega-million production deal and Bridgerton is the first of her long awaited Netflix shows.
Boiled down to an elevator pitch the show is essentially Gossip Girl set in the world of Pride and Prejudice, but it’s so much more in that. The show opens on the eve of a debutante ball, where young ladies are newly debuted on the marriage meat market. Initially it looks like any period piece, but soon you see it’s so much cleverer. A commitment to representing racial diversity is the hallmark of Shondaland and something that she had championed by casting actors of colour in authority roles in most of her shows. Here, we see a black queen resplendent against a court of every color. If the visual is jarring, that says more about the implicit racial bias within us as viewers, and it is that fencing match with the viewer that the show plays for eight glorious episodes of gowns, angst, stockings and sex scenes.
In the same way that brilliant shows like Schitts Creek addressed homophobia by showing a world completely absent of it, the universe of the show doesn’t pander for permission to its audience for its cast of black power. This, of course, did nothing to stop racists from insisting history shouldn’t be rewritten, a fact they often tend to ignore when Henry the Eighth is played by a man with six packs or Dr. Who comes in to meet an alien. Or even, as is the case with this show, when every dress comes from a different historical decade.
There has not been a day this year where I haven’t spent at least an hour swiping down boxes of content suggestions so specific I could swear the Netflix algorithms hacked my soul
Their problem is not that the history is being rewitter, but that their racism is being critiqued so expertly. They feel judged, and as well they should. We, none of us, own history, and it will always be right to err on the side of inclusion.
As well as the colorful court, there is a pervasive sense that the show is a post-modern look at modern society’s fetish for the trappings of the past. Each of the character (and there are many) feel like modern people dealing with a 19th-century feudal prisons, and in that way most Pakistani Netflix watchers will groan with familiarity at the dowager grandmothers, secret flings, feudal alliances, loveless marriages and immense societal pressure to conform to a society no one wants to be in for too much of the day.
I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that as I leave a decade marred with so much strife, discontent and disinformation: shows like Bridgerton offer a nuances roadmap for how to reconcile with the past while being hopefully for a brighter future.
Welcome to the 20s!
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