With ‘Bridgerton,’ Scandal Comes to Regency England
Read on New York Times
Dec 18, 2020
Quoted from the article’s beginning:
Shonda Rhimes generally doesn’t pay much attention to the breathless fan chatter around her television shows. (It’s because she’s too busy, she said, not because she doesn’t care.)
But in the lead-up to the premiere of “Bridgerton,” the first original Netflix show under the Shondaland banner, she found herself watching a fan video in which a young woman plays the show’s trailer and records her in-the-moment reactions. In the video, the YouTuber, a devotee of romance novels, said that television was finally taking her genre seriously, Rhimes recalled.
The prolific showrunner does not consider herself an avid romance reader, but she devoured Julia Quinn’s “Bridgerton” series about the moneyed marriage market of 19th century England, and like the fan, she did not understand why more books of that genre have not been adapted onto the screen, while Jane Austen novels have been wrung dry.
“It’s fascinating to me that no one has really done it before,” said Rhimes, an executive producer on the show. “Romance novels really lend themselves to the TV genre. They’re visual; they’re well paced; they have great plots.”
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