The Case for Bridgerton

I have all sorts of conceptual problems with Bridgerton. I have an inability to stop questions (oh so many questions) from ruining my fun.

But I also have to acknowledge that these conceptual problems may also stem from a subtle inflection of snobbery. I need to acknowledge just how much people need a bit of glamour in their lives.

If your working environment is comparatively grey and your hours are long and grinding and you always seem to have too much month left at the end of the money then the last thing you want to do in the evening is kick back to The Bicycle Thieves. No, you want Bridgerton.

Bridgerton is a universe of colour, colour which flows out from the radiant skin tones onto the luxuriant fabrics and then informs the “natural” world (such as it is). The skies are always blue in Bridgerton unless a primary character is very sad in which case it’s allowed to rain. Or if you want a thin shirt to get very wet.

I have no problem with the acting or the casting with Bridgerton. Sometimes (often) the dialogue is fairly (deliberately) ludicrous and scenery chewing is required. It helps that the scenery is gorgeous.

The costumes are hypnotically bizarre. This season, Queen Charlotte’s wigs have threatened to accommodate live birds while Cressida Cowper (whose name would have been pronounced Cooper – I’m sorry but it would have been) gives the Queen herself a run for her money in terms of the limits of sartorial credibility with shoulder pads that threaten to take someone’s eye out (there’s a Bridgerton/Game of Thrones crossover right there).

Bridgerton does sex scenes phenomenally well. Decades before Bridgerton is set, there was a genre known as “amatory fiction” dominated by authors such as Eliza Haywood and Delarivier Manley. These women did not write “porn” but they certainly wrote some pulse-racing stuff. As I like to say, there is nothing accidental about making the heart the organ associated with romance because when the heart wants what the heart wants you can feel it beating faster. In this sense, Bridgerton belongs more in the 1720s than in the 1810s.

Credit to all involved in a Bridgerton sex scene. There’s the sexiness that comes from nervous but sincere and repeated consent. Nothing is sexier than consent, and slowness only reinforces consent. Layers of elaborate clothing reinforce consensual sexiness because each barrier is a potential “Stop” sign and the more “Stop” signs one encounters, the more often it is necessary and exciting to understand a “Go”. Bridgerton costumes enforce a multiplication of “yes”.

Nervousness is sexy, embarrassment is sexy, and carefulness is sexy. Bridgerton has all the responsible sexiness I want to see on screen.

Then there’s the inclusive/exclusive dynamic. The “ton” love to be talked about while professing to be scandalised by it. Lady Whistledown makes a small world seem even smaller than it is. She might be a footnote in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. A scandalised community hugs itself even as it tears itself apart.

I’ve a special fondness for Mr and Mrs Mondrich. Elevated to the aristocracy, they consider and then reconsider to what extent its obscene privileges are worth its ludicrous protocols. Mr and Mrs Mondrich are our surrogates – they behave very much as we think we might if we were thrown into the ton. Oh – and they love each other. A lot.

Nichola Coughlan has dominated Season Three and has triumphed by “coming out” as Lady Whistledown. The extent to which subsequent seasons can function as well now that the frisson of anonymity has been lost is unclear. Season Three has been about how the observer becomes observed, how the wallflower emerges from the wallpaper, how the chameleon fixes its colour. Lady Whistledown can be everywhere and nowhere. Mrs Penelope Bridgerton can only be in one place at a time.

On a more practical level. People are likely to be somewhat reserved talking to Penny from now on. Or maybe not. Perhaps we’ll see new levels of shark-jumping outrageousness. Anything to make the papers.

The problematics of Bridgerton will continue to nag me – its occlusion of labour and politics in particular. But I’ve also an obligation to frankly acknowledge the basis of its success – which isn’t really about snobbery at all but a kind of cosplay inclusiveness. Doctor Who managed to tell the truth about the Bridgerton universe in a way that Bridgerton itself has yet to. But to deny the appeal of the cosplay fantasy is to alienate oneself from some of the most paradoxically democratic of aesthetic prompts.