‘I didn’t think about Meghan Markle when writing’: Bridgerton’s Shonda Rhimes on race, royals and romps
She’s sheepish about it now, but it’s true: when Shonda Rhimes started out, she had big ambitions – and no problem speaking them aloud: “This always sounds crazy, but I would say to my friends and to my agent: ‘I want to take over the world through television.’”
Twenty-eight years on, it doesn’t sound odd at all. Rhimes is the powerhouse behind production company Shondaland and its string of zeitgeist-making TV shows, which hook millions worldwide. Her hits include medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, still going strong after 19 seasons. Political thriller Scandal (2012-2018), which starred Kerry Washington as “TV’s most glamorous antihero” and showcased Trump-era skulduggery while it was still just a twinkle in the Donald’s eye. And sexy legal thriller How to Get Away With Murder (2014-2020), which the Egot-winning actor Viola Davis credits with “putting me on the map”.
And then there’s Bridgerton, which reimagines Regency-era London as a racially diverse rompathon, replete with acid-hued ballgowns and string quartet takes on Billie Eilish. Historically scrupulous it is not, but beloved it most certainly is. Among the 82 million people who devoured it in the first four weeks were Kim Kardashian and the Clintons. According to Bill, his family binged the entire season together in a single evening.
Best of all, Rhimes seems to be enjoying her streaming era – she signed a $100m deal with Netflix in 2017. The ultimate proof of this is Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Rhimes’s most personal and pleasurable project yet. Having retrieved the showrunning reins from Bridgerton’s Chris Van Dusen, she is telling the backstory of the monarch loosely based on Charlotte of MecklenburgS-trelitz (1744-1818). The 17-year-old Charlotte arrived in the British court as a ridiculed outsider, yet she managed to sustain her eventful marriage to George III through 57 years, 15 children and his multiple bouts of mental illness, eventually emerging as the imperious diva of Bridgerton’s imaginings. “She was outsized, very glamorous, held herself above everyone,” says Rhimes of the character’s appeal. “There was a lot to mine.”
Young Charlotte is played by newcomer India Amarteifio with protofeminist pluck, and the instantly engaging verve of all Rhimes’s female leads. We see her struggling to seduce her amateur astronomer husband-tobe (heartthrob Corey Mylchreest) – hers is the only “heavenly body” he’s notinterested in, apparently – and forging a life-long friendship with the young Lady Agatha Danbury (Arsema Thomas). “It’s more than a romance story,” says Rhimes. “It’s a story about a woman coming into her own, it’s a story about friendships, about power, about
politics. I enjoyed writing her more than I’ve enjoyed writing any other character.”
Could this be because Rhimes relates to Queen Charlotte, one powerful woman to another? Rhimes won’t concede this directly, but does say: “I think there’s a lot about her that feels like women today and what happens when they become successful … It was exciting to me to go backwards and figure out how she got to be this amazing, powerful woman. What were her hopes and dreams? How did she make this journey into power?”
Rhimes’s own journey began in suburban Chicago in 1970, where she was born the incredibly shy, youngest of six children to a cultured family in which academic achievement was highly prized. “We didn’t watch a lot of television in our house,” she says. “My parents are education intellectuals and they were not interested.” The children were encouraged to read instead, which Shonda did prodigiously. It came as no surprise when she was accepted at the Ivy League Dartmouth College. She initially intended to be a novelist, but pivoted to study screenwriting in Los Angeles. As she told Dartmouth’s graduating class of 2014: “I couldn’t be Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison because Toni Morrison already had that job … [but] I read an article that said it was harder to get into USC film school than it was to get into Harvard law school.” From there she secured an internship at Denzel Washington’s production company and early writing credits on Britney Spears’s 2002 movie Crossroads and The Princess Diaries 2.
It wasn’t until the 32-year-old Rhimes was at home with a wakeful baby (she adopted her first of three daughters in 2002) that she got properly into TV. Shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Felicity and 24 became her loyal companions during the early days of single motherhood: “I felt like I had this amazing discovery of television much later in life; how great and rich it was.” As a consequence perhaps, Rhimes’s TV writing has always retained this sense of indulging us with a slightly naughty treat. Certainly, Bridgerton arrived in 2020 like a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift from Auntie Shonda, at the end of a long, difficult year.
As for any claims of a higher purpose? Queen Charlotte has a disclaimer that pertly reminds us that this “is not a history lesson … All liberties taken by the author are quite intentional.” Yet some liberties are more intentional than others. For instance: “We took the idea that Queen Charlotte was from Black Portuguese royalty and ran with it,” says Rhimes, referring to the largely debunked rumour that historical Charlotte was Black or mixed race. This provided the tiny narrative seed from which Bridgerton cultivated a racially neutral period setting, in which the existence of Black dukes and South Asian debutantes goes largely unremarked upon.
Queen Charlotte takes a different tack. This prequel is set at the point on the fictional timeline when the King’s marriage to a Black woman heralded a large-scale diversification of English society – a sort of affirmative action for the aristos. As a result, race and racism are necessarily an issue.
This upfront approach might be new, but racially diverse, femalefronted casts are Shondaland to the core. Indeed, while Rhimes is justifiably proud of things such as the “huge number of women who have gone into science or medicine because of Grey’s Anatomy”, her most obvious legacy is making onscreen diversity the TV norm. As Rhimes told curious media back in 2005, when Grey’s Anatomy first aired, she simply cast her shows as she saw the world: “We’re post-civil rights, post-feminist babies and we take it for granted that we live in a diverse world.”
But a lot has changed since 2005, including the rollback of women’s reproductive rights in the US and the global wake-up call of Black Lives Matter. Does Rhimes still feel the same? “Everybody thought they were ‘post’ everything back then,” she says. “And I think we’ve all learned we’re not ‘post’ anything. We have a lot of challenges to face.” Her main point still stands, though: “I was trying to say the same thing I always say now: I wasn’t going to make a show that didn’t include me, y’know?”
Just how much of herself does she include? She laughs at the suggestion that the Lady Danbury-Queen Charlotte relationship is based on her own real-life friendship with longtime producing partner Betsy Beers. (“That’s hilarious! No, not at all, actually”) It sounds like the real Lady Danbury in Rhimes’s life may be her sister Delorse: “She is the person I show all shows to when I’m done. I know, just looking at her face, whether something’s gonna be good or not. It’s like some sort of razorsharp focus. She’s never been wrong.”
Rhimes also refuses to be drawn on the hard-to-avoid parallels between Queen Charlotte and another young mixed-Black woman in the public eye: “I didn’t think about Meghan Markle when I was writing this. That didn’t enter into the equation for me,” she says I’m not necessarily interested in whatever is going on [with the royal family] now.”
For related reasons, Rhimes refuses to read gossip – no Lady Whistledown pamphlet for her – and avoids social media. She wants to maintain the structural integrity of the Bridgerton-verse. “I love the fans and that they have opinions, [but] I don’t take anything they say about story in, because I have a responsibility – not to the actors, not to the fans, not to the streamer – but to the story itself. I have to think of that world as real. It’s hard to do – especially when the fans are mad about something.”
This is the steely self-containment that has allowed Rhimes to attain huge success, if not quite the world domination she declared would be hers: “I had no idea what I was talking about when I said that! Then I had to keep repeating it because I’d already said it to my agent. But after a while it became like a challenge; to figure out how to get somewhere in television.” Maybe Rhimes didn’t take over the world, but instead created her own world, in her own image – inclusive, fun and romantic – and made us all want to live in it. Welcome to Shondaland, population 82 million and counting.