“Queen Charlotte” Has Shonda Rhimes All Over It

“Whales died so I could look like this,” seventeen-year-old Charlotte (India Amarteifio) says matter-of-factly to her brother, Adolphus (Tunji Kasim), on their way to London, where she is to marry the king of England. The whalebone corset she’s obliged to wear—“rather delicate and also very, very sharp”—has rendered her immobile for the siblings’ six-hour stagecoach journey, while her dress, made of two-hundred-year-old lace and encrusted with sapphires, imposes its own restrictions. “I am forced into a ludicrous gown so stylish that, if I move too much,” Charlotte continues, “I might be sliced and stabbed to death by my undergarments.” She deadpans, “Oh, how joyful it is to be a lady.”

Welcome back to the pop-feminist and preposterously pretty world of “Bridgerton,” where the sugariness of the eye candy pairs delectably with the show’s tart nods toward social inequities. The Netflix series, adapted from Julia Quinn’s historical romance novels, has expanded into a franchise with the equally lavish “Queen Charlotte,” a prequel spinoff. But the more pleasurable return might be to the theatrical righteousness and politically charged couplings of Shondaland, the production company founded by Shonda Rhimes, the TV powerhouse behind “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” and “Inventing Anna.” Though Rhimes’s imprimatur was all over the marketing campaign for the early iterations of “Bridgerton,” she was neither its creator nor a credited writer on any of its episodes. In contrast, five of the six scripts for “Queen Charlotte” bear her name, an almost startling level of participation for the television mogul. There’s a distinct Shonda-ness to the dialogue, which recalls “Scandal” ’s snippy banter and florid, time-stopping monologues, as well as that series’ obsession with optics. Who needs the glowing fairy lights of “Bridgerton” when this more world-weary spectacle boasts so many confident fingerprints?

The spinoff is meant to tell two tales: the story of why Charlotte, an orphan from a small German province, was chosen to wed George III (the tyrant who impelled Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence), and an explanation of how this version of Great Britain came to be a color-blind society that embraces Charlotte, a light-skinned Black European, as their queen. (The belief that the historical Charlotte had Black ancestry is apparently widespread in the U.K., though the theory emerged only in the mid-twentieth century.) When Charlotte first meets Princess Augusta (Michelle Fairley), George’s high-handed mother and the power behind the throne, the older white woman inspects the bride-to-be’s teeth and hands in an echo of the slave trade. “You did not say she would be that brown,” Augusta rails at one of her advisers behind closed doors—an allusion to the real-life British royals’ alleged concerns over the skin tone of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s progeny. Augusta, realizing that her son’s already weak standing would be further undermined by the P.R. mess of a poorly chosen wife, reframes the mistake as a move toward racial equality, and embarks on what she calls “the Great Experiment,” a desegregation project that elevates several wealthy families of color into the ranks of the nobility. If, as Harry and Meghan claim, his family sold out the couple by playing into the British public’s racism, Rhimes seems to imply that an institution of supposed God-given authority could have done just the opposite.

This counter-history is hardly convincing as a remedy to ingrained prejudice. England is a global power in the show’s universe, and the actual British Empire arose largely through the brutal extractions of colonialism and slavery. But this is also an alternate universe where eighteenth-century musicians play twenty-first-century pop hits and the reigning English monarch is toe-curlingly handsome, so let us feel free to exercise some suspension of disbelief.

“Bridgerton” ’s first season gave the romance genre an update by deferring the climax until after the wedding; its protagonist, Daphne, fought for her happily ever after with a husband who had, unbeknownst to her, vowed never to have children, to spite his abusive, lineage-fixated father. Charlotte suffers a similar post-nuptial shock. Kept from meeting her future husband until their wedding, Charlotte flees the ceremony hall, until she’s found and charmed back by George (Corey Mylchreest) himself. Then, on their wedding night, George takes her to “Buckingham House,” where she is to live, alone. He retires to his own palace, in Kew. “This is for the best,” he asserts. Charlotte doesn’t know what sex is, but she knows that she’s supposed to be having it in order to fulfill her purpose in England, where she has no family, a possible adversary in her mother-in-law, and a formality-laden alliance with her secretary, Brimsley (Sam Clemmett)—a closeted gay man who squabbles with his lover, Reynolds (Freddie Dennis), a secretary to the King, over which of the royals is to blame for the sorry state of the marital union.

Whether the King and Queen consummate their marriage quickly becomes a matter of nationwide consequence. If the first interracial royal marriage ends in failure, Agatha Danbury (Arsema Thomas), a lady-in-waiting, assumes, the Great Experiment might peter out as well. Better known to “Bridgerton” fans as the sage Lady Danbury, Agatha tries to convince Charlotte that she has a responsibility to her people as England’s first Black royal. It’s a surprisingly hard sell. Coming from a seemingly less stratified milieu, Charlotte has little concept of the hardships that Brits of color face. And, although in possession of a willful imperiousness, she’s never had to advocate for anyone besides herself. Charlotte’s self-absorption leads the darker-skinned, politically wily Lady Danbury to negotiate directly with Augusta on behalf of England’s new peerage class. The series makes the burgeoning friendships and solidarities among women nearly as moving as its central romance, and the ministerial chess match between Augusta and Lady Danbury, who each grapple for influence in ways that are invisible to most men, proves unexpectedly engaging, especially in one toughness-building talk that evokes “Scandal” ’s impassioned intolerance for female mediocrity.

There are just enough softhearted men to love these hard-nosed women. The technocratic, astronomy-adoring George resents just as much as any headstrong princess that he is treated like “a royal stud horse trotted out for the chosen mare.” He also harbors a (purposefully ill-defined) psychological malady that threatens his reign and leaves him feeling unworthy of his scepter. (It’s been hypothesized that the actual George III had bipolar disorder.) Charlotte’s long journey toward a patient understanding of her husband’s disability—and his acceptance that she can love him despite his condition—makes for a romance that feels undeniably modern.

Unlike most origin stories, “Queen Charlotte” doesn’t kill the mystique of its titular character, whose haughty grandeur and rococo hairdos in her dowager years are glimpsed in Regency-era flash-forwards. This later time line, which is also the one in which “Bridgerton” is set, follows Her Majesty and Lady Danbury (played in these scenes by Golda Rosheuvel and Adjoa Andoh) as silver-haired matrons. (Amarteifio and Thomas, the younger actors, wonderfully prefigure the mannerisms of their characters’ older selves.) After decades of marriage, George and Charlotte have fifteen children, but no legitimate grandchildren, a situation that imperils their bloodline. The franchise hews to historicity when it wants, and the Queen is forced to reflect on how her dedication to her unwell husband, combined with the social norm of upper-class women relying on hired help to care for their children, may have extinguished her maternal instincts. Elsewhere, Lady Danbury and Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), the mother of several children entering the marriage market, strike up an intimate friendship based on their shared sexual and romantic bereftness in widowhood. The characters’ middle-aged yearning feels nearly as relevant to today as it does to an era when women past childbearing age were uncertain of what they could be, other than financial burdens on male relatives. “We are untold stories,” Lady Danbury muses. Pull up a chair. ♦