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      Netflix Lures ‘Bridgerton’ Fans With Live Event: The Queen’s Ball

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      LOS ANGELES — The wisteria drips from the archway while classical music plays over the loudspeakers. Powder-wigged valets present champagne to guests who gaze at Empire-waist dresses, peer into a room filled with makeup and accessories or head to a stage for a quick oil portrait (actually a digital photo with a Regency England-esque filter).This is The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience, an immersive, Instagram-ready confection held in the ballrooms of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and tailor made for die-hard fans of the global Netflix hit. The 200 to 300 guests aren’t able to meet Regé-Jean Page, the breakout star of the first season of “Bridgerton,” who declined to return to the 19th-century drama. But they can bow before an actress doing her best impression of Queen Charlotte (right down to the haughty glare), learn a dance set to a string quartet version of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams,” participate in a Lady Whistledown scavenger hunt and possibly even be granted the coveted honor of being named the “diamond of the evening.”The 90-minute experience — which will open to the public on Thursday and run for at least two months before traveling to Washington, Chicago and Montreal — is Netflix’s most ambitious real-world event to date. (A similar version opened in London this month.) The streaming giant hopes it serves as a marketing tool for “Bridgerton” and appeals to the show’s primarily female fan base, which is often ignored when it comes to fan culture.Performers at the “Bridgerton” ball, which will travel to Washington, Chicago and Montreal after its Los Angeles run.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIt is also a bid to amplify the kind of water-cooler buzz that has been elusive for streaming shows. Since their episodes tend to be released in one batch, the week-to-week anticipation familiar to fans of traditional network television can be diluted.“This really goes towards my vision of what I’ve always wanted us to be able to do,” the “Bridgerton” creator Shonda Rhimes said in a Zoom interview from her home in New York, before bringing up two of her popular ABC dramas, “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal.” “People who watched ‘Grey’s’ weren’t just watching ‘Grey’s’ on Thursday night — they were trying to find other ways to consume it. ‘Scandal’ was not a show that people watched on Thursday nights and then just didn’t talk about it the rest of the week.”In its 18th season, “Grey’s Anatomy” is still broadcast television’s No. 1 show in the critical 18-to-49-year-old demographic. “Scandal” ended in 2018 after seven seasons.“Being at Netflix allows us to take that desire for the fans and to create a thing where you’re allowing them to be part of the experience more than just on one night of the week or one hour a week,” added Ms. Rhimes, who recently renewed her lucrative Netflix deal for five more years, adding additional revenue streams like podcasts and video games.In addition to The Queen’s Ball, which costs between $49 and $99 to attend, Netflix has teamed up with Bloomingdale’s for a pop-up shop both online and at the flagship Manhattan store ($995 lilac Malone Souliers floral appliquéd pumps, anyone?). There is also a line of cosmetics from Pat McGrath, a British makeup artist whose makeup was used in the production of “Bridgerton”; a soundtrack featuring pop hits played by a string quartet; and a Netflix book club, whose March pick is “The Viscount Who Loved Me,” the second book in the series, by Julia Quinn, that serves as the show’s source material.“Bridgerton” tea for sale at the ball.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesMakeup can be purchased, too.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesTraditional Hollywood studios have been playing this game for a long time. For instance, the second that one of its shows or movies is a hit, Disney starts pumping out related products. But it is a relatively new strategy for Netflix. (The streamer did roll out “Squid Game” tracksuits in partnership with the South Korean brand Musinsa late last year, soon after the series took off.)Inside the World of “Bridgerton”The Netflix series, whose second season is out this March, infuses period-drama escapism with modern-day sensibilities.Sparkling Period Piece: The show is a Regency romance and society drama with unstuffy pop aesthetic, writes our television critic.The Secret Is Out: A big reveal in the first season put Nicola Coughlan at the center of the action. Here is what the star says about her new fame.Approach to Race: Departing from most period dramas, “Bridgerton” imagines a 19th-century Britain with Black royalty and aristocrats.Fashion Trends: The show has helped fuel the resurgence of period clothing, corsets included. And the costumes are only the beginning.Across the Pond: “Bridgerton,” which is filmed in Bath, is one of several productions made in Britain, drawn by the labor pool and tax incentives.In the past couple of years, Netflix has placed an emphasis on live, out-of-home experiences. First there was a Covid-conscious “Stranger Things” drive-through event in 2020, then an event where participants searched for a bank vault in a heist experience tied to the series “La Casa de Papel.” Recently, the company held a virtual reality event for Zack Snyder’s zombie film “Army of the Dead.”What does all this do for Netflix’s bottom line? The company says over one million people have attended its live events, a number it expects to increase significantly as long as Covid-19 remains on the wane.Netflix wouldn’t discuss the economics of the events, but Ted Sarandos, its co-chief executive, referred to the “Bridgerton” live experience on the company’s January earnings call as part of its efforts to create franchises out of “whole cloth.” He predicted that “fans will flock to and flood their social media feeds with” photos from The Queen’s Ball.Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s head of global TV, added in a recent interview, “I really love that we’re building these universes and doing these consumer products that are completely just so much about female fandom.”Organizers say demand for The Queen’s Ball in Los Angeles has been as manic as the early reception for “Bridgerton”: 88 percent of tickets had been bought two weeks before its opening.Michael Vorhaus, a longtime digital media consultant, said such events helped prolong interest in content that in the Netflix universe is consumed and discarded faster than a sparsely filled-out dance card.“It’s Harry Potter for adults,” he said of “Bridgerton.” “You’ve got eight books. And if the consumption numbers hold up, then presumably they will make all eight, and who knows beyond that? Every dollar they’re spending now building a community, every dollar that builds buzz for them, they’re getting paid off over eight seasons.”Jaqi Harris, left, and Sarah Durnesque, guests at the ball, reading the gossip in Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesPlus, with an audience that’s primarily women ages 18 to 45, Netflix is appealing to a group that is traditionally not courted as rabid consumers of pop culture.“It’s a very underserved fan base,” said Greg Lombardo, head of experiences at Netflix. “In this space there are not a lot of offerings out there that are really geared towards a female audience.”Indeed, it was a milestone when the cast of the first “Twilight” movie showed up at Comic-Con in 2008, introducing a new demographic to the predominantly male-skewed fan convention. “Fifty Shades of Grey” followed suit with an extensive line of merchandising. “Outlander” and “Downton Abbey” have also proved the purchasing power of a largely female fan base.“It’s not that revolutionary to suggest that women are enormous consumers of products, and when they are a fan of something, they are hard-core fans of something,” Ms Rhimes said. “I have known that for the 20-something years I’ve been doing my job. The difference here is that we are now in an era in which the people who create those universes are not strictly men.”But more often than not, big mainstream franchises are still primarily aimed toward young men, with spaces carved out for others to join, said Katherine Morrissey, a professor at Arizona State University who studies fan culture.“It seems like Netflix is very aware that the audience for ‘Bridgerton’ is not necessarily going to think of itself as a fandom in the way that we kind of stereotype fandoms,” she said. “They’re very aware that their consumers are going to be interested in similar things but are going to want them packaged in totally different ways. They’re not necessarily going to be self-identified like, ‘This is the thing I did at Comic-Con.’”The soapy, sexy romance novels seem perfect for Ms. Rhimes’s streaming ambitions. Each book focuses on a child of the Bridgerton family and the efforts to marry the child off successfully (i.e., for love) per the customs of early-19th-century England. Each features a self-contained story line — a dream for Ms. Rhimes, who has had to keep churning out plot twists for her long-running network shows. Now she can tell distinct stories, plus a spinoff season dedicated to Queen Charlotte, who was the wife of King George III and may have been England’s first Black queen, a character Ms. Rhimes has been obsessed with for years.Netflix has already greenlit Seasons 3 and 4 of “Bridgerton” and the Queen Charlotte spinoff, which will enter production shortly.“It’s an incredible gift,” said Betsy Beers, Ms. Rhimes longtime producing partner. “It really provides for an incredible fluidity of storytelling and also, economically, is very sensible on both the practical and production end.”It has also allowed for Netflix’s six-person live events team to adapt the “Bridgerton” experience for future seasons. (An anthropomorphized bumblebee makes a foreboding entrance in the new live show, something only the fans who have binged the whole second season will immediately understand.)“This really goes towards my vision of what I’ve always wanted us to be able to do,” said Shonda Rhimes, who created the Netflix hit.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesBack at the Biltmore, once the guests have curtsied their way to an introduction to the queen and learned their dance moves, they are escorted into a larger ballroom for a dance performance between a handsome duke and a coquettish duchess. With a string quartet playing pop songs, the guests are then encouraged to join in the fun, while the queen evaluates them for their diamond potential. (With bars stationed strategically throughout the experience, Netflix realizes lowered inhibitions augment the event. Sixteen dollars gets you one of an array of cocktails, including the Whistledown & Dirty, which contains Absolut vodka, mint and San Pellegrino limonata.)From on high, over the quartet’s playing of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” bellows the voice of Lady Whistledown’s protégé, Lady Heartell, who was created for the ball: “I don’t know about all of you, but I got what I came for.”If Netflix has planned it correctly, the audience did, too. More

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      The Secret Is Out on Nicola Coughlan, a ‘Bridgerton’ Star

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      A few years ago, Nicola Coughlan was working in an optician’s office in Ireland. Now, with “Bridgerton” and “Derry Girls,” she’s starring in two of the most beloved shows on Netflix.In January, right around her 35th birthday, the Irish actress Nicola Coughlan took what she called “a mega-holiday” — New York City, Austin, Hawaii, New York City again.Back in Manhattan, she played tourist: She ate at fancy restaurants, went to a taping of “Saturday Night Live” (not quite the tourist, she went to the after-party, too), and saw a Broadway show. The show was “Company,” a musical about a 35-year-old in the midst of an existential crisis, and as Coughlan left the theater, she saw a towering Times Square billboard. The billboard, an ad for the new season of the saucy Netflix costume drama “Bridgerton,” showed her own face at the center.“We walked up the street a little bit and there it was, like, huge, huge, huge,” she said. “Oh my goodness, it was massive.”Coughlan — chirpy, confiding, with the most perfect skin I have ever seen on an adult human — was speaking at the end of her trip, just before she flew back home to London. She had selected an Irish pub, Molly’s Shebeen, in Gramercy Park, and arrived a few minutes late because her car had first taken her instead to Molly Wee, a different pub near Penn Station.Molly’s seemed like a parody of an Irish pub. “I enjoy this interpretation,” she said. Coughlan is not above a bit of parody herself. She carries a leprechaun key ring and her Instagram bio reads “Small Irish Acting Person.” That afternoon she wore winter white — as a self-described “messy bastard,” this was her version of risk-taking — and a small horde of delicate gold jewelry, including a nameplate necklace. The fans at the pub, who recognized her from the widely celebrated Netflix comedy “Derry Girls,” knew her name already.Coughlan didn’t initially realize that her role on “Bridgerton” was effectively two roles: the wallflower Penelope and also the cunning Lady Whistledown.Liam Daniel/Netflix“Derry Girls” gave Coughlan — who had been working at an optician’s office in her hometown, Galway, Ireland, only a year before she was cast — her first substantial role. That role eventually led to the one in “Bridgerton,” which became one of Netflix’s most-watched series ever and returns for its second season on March 25.As a star of two of the most beloved shows on the world’s largest streaming service, Coughlan is now kind of a big deal. With a billboard to prove it.For Coughlan, the youngest daughter of an army officer father and a homemaker mother, success didn’t come overnight; it came over thousands of nights. After college, where she studied English and classics, she enrolled in a six-month foundation course at the Oxford School of Drama. She was turned down for the multiyear course. Then she followed her new best friend, the playwright Camilla Whitehill, to the Birmingham School of Acting, where she completed a one-year course. She was turned down for the multiyear one there, too.At Oxford, and then at Birmingham, Coughlan developed a gift for comedy and, because she has always looked mind-bendingly young for her age, a knack for playing children. (Yes, she moisturizes, but she showed me photos on her phone and looking mind-bendingly young is a family trait.)Afterward, she moved to London, where she took a series of retail jobs — beauty products, frozen yogurt — and tried to find work as a grown-up actor. She didn’t succeed. Petite, pert, childlike, she couldn’t attract the interest of a manager or an agent. More than once, her bank balance dropped to double digits. More than once, she had to move back home.“It was like, Oh, the dream died,” she said.But it didn’t, not quite. Whitehill remembers how Coughlan tempered each defeat with a kind of resilience. “Deep, deep down, she believed in herself,” Whitehill said on a video call. “She did have some awful — like, truly, truly awful — part-time jobs that were depressing as hell. But I never really doubted her.”Finally, Coughlan, by then nearly 30, landed a role as a posh 15-year-old girl in the 2016 two-hander “Jess and Joe Forever,” at the Orange Tree Theater in London. Her performance attracted the interest of an agent, who secured her an audition for “Derry Girls,” a comedy about a group of schoolgirls — and one boy — in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, at the periphery of the country’s sectarian conflict. The audition was rigorous: a six-month process of callbacks and chemistry reads.“It was torture,” she said. “I wanted it so badly.”Coughlan thought “the dream died” several times during her acting career, but things turned around when she hit her 30s.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesCoughlan studied up on Northern Irish accents and she put together a whole notebook for her character, the high-achieving, high-anxiety, 16-year-old “wee lesbian” Clare. Lisa McGee, who created “Derry Girls,” remembers that notebook, which had Clare’s name in glitter on the front.“She had written loads of stuff about the character, and I thought, You’ve done more work than me on this character,” McGee said.Coughlan approached the role with a sense of both heedlessness and complete calculation, qualities she would later bring to “Bridgerton.” McGee marveled at the speed and precision of her comic timing.“I could write more jokes for Clare once I saw the way Nicola was playing her,” McGee said.Even then, Coughlan wasn’t sure that she would find another job. “I was like, Well, that’s it now. I struck gold, but it won’t happen again,” she said. She whiffed on several subsequent auditions and when the producers of “Bridgerton” contacted her agent, she didn’t hold out much hope.An assistant casting director brought her in to read for Eloise Bridgerton, the spunky, freethinking fifth-born sibling. Coughlan didn’t think that the audition had gone particularly well. But when the showrunner Chris Van Dusen saw her tape, he knew he had to cast her as Penelope Featherington, Eloise’s 17-year-old best friend.Her first substantial role came in “Derry Girls,” set in 1990s Northern Ireland.Hat Trick Productions“I called all of our other producers into the room and showed them the tape,” Van Dusen recalled. “I’m happy to say that everyone loved her as much as I did.”Told that she had the part, Coughlan tempered her enthusiasm. She had known plenty of actors who were hired onto prestige projects and then fired when the studio demanded a bigger name. “I should have been like, This is amazing,” she said. “Instead, I was like, This is fishy. I don’t know about this.” She remained tense throughout the first table read.But she wasn’t fired. And in the midst of her fittings, she finally learned, via a Reddit forum, how large her role would be and that it was effectively two roles: the wallflower Penelope — the face she presents to the world — and also the cunning Lady Whistledown, the nom de plume Penelope uses to write and publish a scandal sheet with the power to bring Regency England to its petticoated knees.She threw herself into the dual role, even as the wig and costume designers of “Bridgerton” fitted her with tight red ringlets and unflattering yellow dresses. “She really suits most colors, but they’ve managed to find the ones that really clash,” Whitehill said. (Coughlan had a more measured response to her wardrobe. “You can’t have vanity in acting,” she said.)The Lady Whistledown reveal doesn’t come until the final episode of Season 1. But from the first script, Coughlan strategized where Penelope needed to stand in order to overhear the gossip that Lady Whistledown would later publish. If you rewatch the first season, you can see her lurking in the background, watching and listening.She practiced eavesdropping in her downtime, too, a habit she now can’t break. (Earlier that day, before she’d met me, she’d gone for a manicure and learned a lot about someone else’s bathroom renovation.) “It’s amazing what people will say when they don’t think you’re listening,” she said.Season 2 of “Bridgerton” brings the same Regency glamour as in the first season, during which the show became Netflix’s most-watched series. (“Squid Game” later surpassed it.)Liam Daniel/NetflixFor Season 2, she added another role. When delivering Lady Whistledown’s copy to the printer, Penelope pretends to be an Irish maid. The character is unnamed in the script but Coughlan calls her Bridget Bridgerton and uses a strong Dublin accent. A “Drag Race” superfan, Coughlan thought of this alter ego as “Penelope’s drag character.”The show will bring further challenges in the future because eventually Penelope will play out her own love story. It comes in the fourth book of the series of novels that inspired the show, “Romancing Mister Bridgerton,” so it may or may not comprise the fourth season. (The show has already been renewed through Season 4.) But already “I feel terrified,” Coughlan said. “I’m probably more comfortable being awkward and funny, so it’s going to be a massive challenge for me. Because it’s not my comfort zone.”The attention that “Bridgerton” has brought hasn’t always been comfortable either. “Fame is a weird thing,” she said.The worst part has been the online scrutiny of her body. Many of the comments about her appearance have been positive, though some have been negative. She doesn’t find any of them helpful. “I’m like, I’m existing,” she said. “And it’s not anyone’s business.” It was the one subject she seemed less than delighted to discuss.A week after we met, she took to Instagram to ask her followers not to send her any comments on her body. “It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day,” she wrote.Still, fame has its upsides. She appeared on “The Great British Baking Show.” (“Most definitely the best experience of my life,” she said, despite the mess she made of her swiss roll.) She became close friends with the “Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness after she made a hoodie with his face on it and showed it off on social media. When she went to “Saturday Night Live,” she and Kristen Wiig hugged. Her handbag game is extremely on point. (That day at Molly’s, she had a cheeky Chanel clutch.)And she is eager to see where her career will take her. Maybe she’ll host “Saturday Night Live” one day. Maybe she’ll finally play a character of legal age.“In a weird way,” she said. “I feel like I’m just getting started.” More

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      Emmy Awards 2021: Watch to Watch For

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      “The Crown” and Netflix could have a big night and bring the streaming service its first top award for a series. Here’s what else to expect, and a look at the favorites and potential upsets.At long last, it should be the year that a streaming platform is triumphant at the Emmys.The tech companies upended the entertainment industry years ago but they’ve had mixed results breaking through with members of the Television Academy, who vote on the winners.That will likely come to an end on Sunday when the envelopes are unsealed at the 73rd Emmy Awards, which will be broadcast on CBS — and, fittingly, streamed live on Paramount+.“The Crown,” the lush Netflix drama chronicling the British royal family, is the heavy favorite to win one of night’s the biggest awards — best drama — on the strength of its fourth season, which took viewers into the 1980s as it portrayed the relationship of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.Seven of the show’s cast members landed acting nominations, including Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles) for best actor and Emma Corrin (Princess Diana) and Olivia Colman (Queen Elizabeth II) for best actress. Gillian Anderson (Margaret Thatcher) and Helena Bonham Carter (Princess Margaret) are among the nominees for best actress in a supporting role.“The Crown” already picked up four Emmys in the first batch of awards handed out during last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards, which recognizes achievements in technical categories.Netflix built a considerable lead over its television and streaming rivals at the Creative Arts Emmys, all but guaranteeing that it will win more awards than any other studio, streaming platform or TV network. A best drama win for “The Crown” would also be a significant first for Netflix. The streaming service has never won a top series award, despite a whopping 30 nominations in best drama, comedy and limited series from 2013 to 2020. Only one streaming service, Hulu, has won best drama, an award that went to “The Handmaid’s Tale” four years ago.It would be a fitting win in a ceremony that is recognizing the best shows aired or streamed amid the pandemic. During the stay-at-home months last year and early this year, people increasingly turned away from cable and embraced streaming video entertainment, accelerating a trend that was already underway.While “The Crown” is the favorite, keep an eye out for spoilers in the best drama race. “The Mandalorian,” the Star Wars action adventure show on Disney+, picked up seven technical awards last weekend, and Television Academy voters love themselves some popular, action-packed entertainment, as evinced by “Game of Thrones” winning the best drama category a record-tying four times.A show with an outside shot is “Bridgerton,” the popular Netflix bodice-ripper from the super producer Shonda Rhimes. FX’s “Pose,” nominated for its final, emotional season, has the best chance at an upset of any of the cable or network series nominated.‘Ted Lasso’ and Jason Sudeikis are favorites.It looks like Apple’s streaming service, not quite two years old, is on the verge of getting its first major Emmys win, thanks to an aphorism-spouting, fish-out-of-water soccer coach.The feel-good Apple TV+ comedy, “Ted Lasso,” is the favorite in the comedy category. Nominated for its rookie season, which had its premiere in August 2020, the show already won best cast in a comedy last weekend. The winner of that award has gone on to win best comedy six years in a row. “Ted Lasso” also cleaned up at the Television Critics Association Awards earlier this month, winning best new series, best comedy and best overall show.Jason Sudeikis and his feel-good Apple TV+ comedy, “Ted Lasso,” are expected to take home multiple awards. Apple TV Plus, via Associated PressJason Sudeikis, the former “Saturday Night Live” stalwart, is poised to win multiple Emmys, including for best writing and best actor in a comedy series. Those would represent his first Emmy wins.A long shot competitor for best comedy is the HBO Max series “Hacks,” starring Jean Smart, who is also likely to win her fourth acting Emmy for her role as a Joan Rivers-like stand-up comic.When it comes to comedy this year, the broadcast and cable networks are on the outside looking in: They earned only one nomination in the category, from ABC’s “black-ish,” its lowest combined total in the history of the Emmys.Cedric the Entertainer hosts a potentially boozy ceremony.The Emmys will be an in-person event for the first time in two years, but it won’t be up to the level, in crowd size or spectacle, of the Before Time. Instead of taking place at the 7,100-seat Microsoft Theater, the ceremony will take place in a tent in downtown Los Angeles, with a few hundred people attending.Most nominees will be seated at tables, with food and drink, à la the Golden Globes, a dash of glamour that the show’s producers hope will provide a jolt to sagging ratings, which last year hit a new low. Some casts and production staffs plan to gather remotely. Nominees from “The Crown” will be ready to celebrate at a party in London, similar to the one “Schitt’s Creek” had last year in Toronto.Cedric the Entertainer will preside over the event, which have nominees seated at tables, with food and drink, à la the Golden Globes.G L Askew II for The New York TimesCedric the Entertainer, the stand-up comedian and star of the CBS sitcom “The Neighborhood,” will host. He has suggested that he won’t go for the kind of lacerating political commentary that figured in the onstage comments made by the recent Emmys hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Michael Che and Colin Jost.“I want to bring a familiarity that comes with my brand of stand-up,” he told The New York Times. “I’m somebody you know. I’m your cousin or your uncle, and we’re here to celebrate each other.”The downsized ceremony matches the reduced circumstance of the TV industry over the last year. Because of production delays during the pandemic, the number of shows submitted for the best drama and comedy races was down 30 percent.Michael K. Williams could win.Michael K. Williams, the beloved star of “The Wire” who was found dead on Sept. 6, is nominated for best supporting actor in a drama for the recently canceled HBO series, “Lovecraft Country.” If he does win — and he’s a slight favorite over Tobias Menzies from “The Crown” — it will not be because Emmys voters wanted to give him the award posthumously. The Emmy voting period ended before Williams’s death.Michael K. Williams, who died earlier this month, could win an Emmy for “Lovecraft Country.”HBO, via Associated PressA win for Mj Rodriguez could be one of the night’s biggest moments. Rodriguez’s performance as Blanca Evangelista on FX’s “Pose” earned her a nomination in the best actress in a drama race, the first time a transgender person has been up for the award. To pull it off, Rodriguez would have to beat Corrin, the favorite for her role as a young Princess Diana in “The Crown.”‘The Queen’s Gambit’ vs. ‘Mare of Easttown’As usual, the Emmys tightest race will come down to best limited series.Months ago, Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” seemed like a sure bet, especially after it claimed limited series honors at the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Television Awards.Anya Taylor-Joy is nominated for her role as a chess prodigy in “The Queen’s Gambit.”Phil Bray/Netflix, via Associated PressKate Winslet could win an Emmy for her role as a detective in “Mare of Easttown.”Michele K. Short/HBOBut there are signs the race has turned into a dead heat. At the Television Critics Association Awards on Sept. 15, HBO’s gritty whodunit “Mare of Easttown” took best limited series honors, and Michaela Coel, the creator and star of another HBO limited series, “I May Destroy You,” won for best performer in any television drama.The best actress in a mini-series will be a showdown, pitting Coel against Kate Winslet, who played the weary detective of “Mare of Easttown,” and Anya Taylor-Joy, who played the chess prodigy in “The Queen’s Gambit.” More

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      ‘Bridgerton’ Star Regé-Jean Page Will Not Appear in Season 2

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      The breakout star of the Shonda Rhimes Netflix series has delivered his final zinger as the rakish Duke of Hastings.Dearest readers, we have bad news.Simon Bassett, the character played by Regé-Jean Page, the breakout star of the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” will not return for the show’s second season, Netflix and Shondaland, Shonda Rhimes’s production company, announced on Friday.The news was delivered, appropriately enough, via a missive from Lady Whistledown, the show’s mysterious narrator — and sometimes instigator — of scandal.“Dearest Readers, while all eyes turn to Lord Anthony Bridgerton’s quest to find a Viscountess, we bid adieu to Regé-Jean Page, who so triumphantly played the Duke of Hastings,” a letter posted by the show’s Twitter account said. “We’ll miss Simon’s presence onscreen, but he will always be a part of the Bridgerton family.”For readers of the Julia Quinn romance novels upon which the series is based, the news will not come as a shock. (The Duke of Hastings’s story line largely concludes in the series’s first novel, “The Duke and I.”)But that did not mean fans were not still mourning his loss on Twitter on Friday.“What?!?? There’s no #Bridgerton without Rene-Jean Page,” one tweeted.When the show left Page’s character and his now-wife, Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), at the end of the first season, she had just given birth to the couple’s first child, a son. Daphne will return for the new season, Netflix said, which will focus on her oldest brother, Anthony, and his own quest for romance.“Daphne will remain a devoted wife and sister, helping her brother navigate the upcoming social season and what it has to offer — more intrigue and romance than my readers may be able to bear,” the letter from Lady Whistledown said.The eight-episode saga, the first original series for Netflix by Shonda Rhimes’s production company, was a hit with both fans and critics, and Netflix reported that 82 million households watched the series in its first month following a Christmas Day release. The show follows the drama of a courting season in 1813 London, with social machinations, scheming and scandal galore as high-society families contrive to pair off their young eligibles.In his review, The New York Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, called the British period drama “sexy, smart popcorn escapism” that believes that characters of color “should get to have just as much fun, have just as much agency and range of possibility — and be just as bad — as anyone else.”Page, who last week won the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding actor in a drama series, recently finished filming the Netflix spy thriller “The Gray Man.” Next up is a role in the film adaptation of “Dungeons & Dragons” for Hasbro/eOne and Paramount.Rhimes, an executive producer of “Bridgerton,” paid tribute to Page’s scene-stealing performance on Instagram on Friday.“Remember: the Duke is never gone,” she wrote. “He’s just waiting to be binge watched all over again.” More

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      ‘Bridgerton’s’ Approach to Race and Casting Has Precedent Onstage

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Bridgerton’s’ Approach to Race and Casting Has Precedent OnstageThere’s been much discussion about the presence of Black actors in Regency England on the Netflix show, but performers of color have been playing historical roles in London theaters for decades.Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in the Netflix series “Bridgerton.”Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixJan. 21, 2021, 3:42 a.m. ETLONDON — As is so often the case, the theater got there first.I’m referring to the approach to race and casting in “Bridgerton,” the sartorially splendid Netflix study in hyperactive Regency-era hormones that everyone’s talking about. Much has been made of the presence across the eight-part series of Black actors populating a Jane Austen-style landscape that is usually shown onscreen as all white.In fact, as London theater observers of a certain generation can attest, this has long been common practice onstage here, across a range of titles and historical periods. That’s been true whether it’s been part of Britain’s pioneering interest in colorblind casting or, as with “Bridgerton,” when productions have played with audience expectations about race to make a point.Either way, the prevailing desire has been to fashion a theatrical world that speaks to the multicultural reality of the country. The idea behind casting a Black actor as a Maine villager (in “Carousel”) or a Viennese court composer (in “Amadeus”) isn’t documentary verisimilitude; rather, it’s to make clear that such time-honored stories belong to all of us, regardless of race.So it seems entirely logical that “Bridgerton” features Black talent — including regulars on the London stage — as nobles and royalty. Among them is Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte, a casting choice intended to reflect the view of some historians that King George III’s wife was biracial.Regé-Jean Page as Simon Basset in “Bridgerton.”Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixAdjoa Andoh as Lady Danbury.Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixIt’s not long in “Bridgerton” before Simon Basset, an eligible Black aristocrat, announces himself with star-making swagger, and no shortage of naked flesh, in the sultry form of newcomer Regé-Jean Page. No less commanding is the Black actress Adjoa Andoh, who arches a mean eyebrow as Simon’s mentor of sorts, Lady Danbury. (She led the cast of a 2019 production of “Richard II” at Shakespeare’s Globe that was performed entirely by actresses of color.)Watching these performers swoop onto the screen, I was reminded of the comparable dazzle some decades back when the actress Josette Simon, who is Black, made her National Theater debut in a 1990 production of Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,” playing Maggie, a character thought to have been based on Miller’s second wife, Marilyn Monroe. Gone was that play’s previously blonde-wigged heroine: Instead, the director Michael Blakemore’s production raised new possibilities about the relationship between Miller’s male lead, the liberal-leaning lawyer Quentin, and the singing star and seductress who becomes his wife.James Laurenson and Josette Simon in “After the Fall” at the National Theater in London in 1990.Credit…Alastair Muir/ShutterstockThat show removed the play from the realm of gossip — that’s to say, how much was Miller revealing about the famously doomed actress to whom he was married? Suddenly, a comparatively minor piece from the playwright seemed both more substantial and more moving, and Simon, who went on to play Cleopatra for the Royal Shakespeare Company just a few years ago, enjoyed a deserved moment of glory.The National Theater has kept pace with “After the Fall” in its casting ever since. Two years later, Nicholas Hytner’s revelatory revival of “Carousel” brought the clarion-voiced Black actor Clive Rowe an Olivier nomination for his role as the sweet, fish-loving Mr. Snow; in 2003, another landmark Hytner staging, “Henry V,” put the Black stage and screen star Adrian Lester in the title role.That fiery modern-dress production, with its evocations of the Iraq war, reminded audiences that combat can be blind to skin color — so why shouldn’t kingship? Lester triumphed in the part, as he had across town at the Donmar Warehouse in 1996 when he became the first Black performer to play Bobby in a major production of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Company.”Adrian Lester as Henry V at the National Theater in 2003.Credit…Ivan Kyncl/ArenaPALThese days, casting across the racial spectrum mostly passes without comment here. But it’s instructive to note the immediate retaliation, in 2018, when the theater critic Quentin Letts, then writing for the Daily Mail, questioned the Royal Shakespeare Company’s casting of Leo Wringer, a Black actor, in a forgotten restoration comedy, “The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich,” written in 1700.“Was Mr. Wringer cast because he is Black?” Letts inquired rhetorically in his review. “If so, the R.S.C.’s clunking approach to politically correct casting has again weakened its stage product.” The company’s artistic director, Gregory Doran, shot back a statement comparing Letts to “an old dinosaur, raising his head from the primordial swamp.”Sometimes, as with a recent, and remarkable, “Amadeus” that featured the vibrant Black actor Lucian Msamati in the role of the Italian composer Antonio Salieri, the casting is colorblind, which means that the performer has been chosen irrespective of race. Elsewhere, as with the Young Vic’s “Death of a Salesman” in 2019, a conscious choice has been made — in that instance, to present the Loman family as Black to change our perspective on a familiar play.“Bridgerton” looks at first as if it may be taking the first route, only to counter that assumption later on, when a surprise discussion among the characters steers the drama toward the second. “Color and race are part of the show,” the series’s creator, Chris Van Dusen, told The New York Times last month.“Bridgerton” harks back to a vanished England of corsets and chastity, while nodding toward the diverse society of today. That dual focus — the ability, from its casting onward, to straddle two worlds at once — is something that has been long understood on the London stage. At a time when London playhouses remain closed, such memories are the stuff of enjoyable reflection. I only hope that, if the second season of “Bridgerton” that Netflix has hinted at ever arrives, I will be squeezing it in between visits to the theater.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.The Netflix hit departs from the homogeneous casting of most period drama, imagining an 18th-century Britain with Black royalty and aristocrats.Adjoa Andoh and Regé-Jean Page confer in an episode of the Netflix series “Bridgerton.”Credit…Liam Danniel/NetflixJan. 5, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET“We were two separate societies divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us,” the quick-witted Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) tells her protégé, the Duke of Hastings. “Look at everything it is doing for us, allowing us to become.” She insists, “Love, Your Grace, conquers all.”Appearing in the fourth episode of “Bridgerton,” the first series produced by Shonda Rhimes as part of her powerhouse Netflix deal, this conversation between the show’s main Black characters is the first explicit mention of race in a story that revolves around the duke, a Black man named Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page), and his passionate courtship of Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), the eldest daughter in the wealthy, white and titled Bridgerton family.The show’s casting diversity is its most immediately striking quality, not just in Black aristocratic characters like the duke and Lady Danbury, but also in the entrepreneurial Madame Genevieve Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) and the working-class couple Will and Alice Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi). All of them are central to the complicated social caste system that make up the show’s version of early 1800s London.“Bridgerton” is not Rhimes’s first dalliance with a multiracial cast in a British period drama. In 2017, she produced “Still Star-Crossed” on ABC, a story that began after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and focused on their cousins Benvolio Montague and Rosaline Capulet, who were forced to marry in order to heal the family rift. Though Benvolio and Rosaline are intentionally cast as a interracial couple, race was neither a point of contention nor grist for social commentary. Instead, viewers were asked to suspend our contemporary racial perceptions in order to accept the colorblind Verona of the past. (This strategy, among others, was largely unsuccessful — “Still Star-Crossed” was canceled after only one season.)“Bridgerton” is set in an early 19th century Britain ruled by Queen Charlotte, who is portrayed by Golda Rosheuvel.Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixIn contrast, the characters of “Bridgerton” never seem to forget their blackness but instead understand it as one of the many facets of their identity, while still thriving in Regency society. The show’s success proves that people of color do not have to be erased or exist solely as victims of racism in order for a British costume drama to flourish.Chris Van Dusen, the “Bridgerton” showrunner, was a writer on Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy” before going on to be a co-executive producer on “Scandal,” a show that both recognized but did not entirely revolve around the interracial tensions of Olivia Pope’s romantic relationships. Applying that same approach to his adaptations of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels, Van Dusen places us in an early 19th century Britain ruled by a Black woman, Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel).“It made me wonder what that could have looked like,” Van Dusen told The New York Times in a recent feature about the show. “Could she have used her power to elevate other people of color in society? Could she have given them titles and lands and dukedoms?”Such a move pushes back against the racial homogeneity of hit period dramas like “Downton Abbey,” which that show’s executive producer, Gareth Neame insisted was necessary for historical accuracy. “It’s not a multicultural time,” he said in a 2014 interview with Vulture. “We can’t suddenly start populating the show with people from all sorts of ethnicities. It wouldn’t be correct.”“Bridgerton” provides a blueprint for British period shows in which Black characters can thrive within the melodramatic story lines, extravagant costumes and bucolic beauty that make such series so appealing, without having to be servants or enslaved. This could in turn create openings for gifted performers who have avoided them in the past.“I can’t do ‘Downton Abbey,’ can’t be in ‘Victoria,’ can’t be in ‘Call the Midwife,’” the actress Thandie Newton told the Sunday Times of London in 2017. “Well, I could, but I don’t want to play someone who’s being racially abused.” She went on, “There just seems to be a desire for stuff about the royal family, stuff from the past, which is understandable, but it just makes it slim pickings for people of color.”For all its innovations, “Bridgerton” has its own blind spots. I found it strange that it is only the Black characters who speak about race, a creative decision that risks reinforcing the very white privilege it seeks to undercut by enabling its white characters to be free of racial identity.Stephanie Levi-John plays a Black woman in Tudor England in “The Spanish Princess.”Credit…Nick Briggs/Starz, via Associated PressWhen Lady Danbury expresses her optimistic belief in the power of love, the duke is more circumspect, countering that Black progress is fragile and dependent on the whims of whichever white king is in charge. But to actually see narrative evidence of this precariousness, you have to turn to other recent British period dramas that featured integral Black characters, like “The Spanish Princess” and “Sanditon.”Taking place in Tudor England, “The Spanish Princess” on Starz features Stephanie Levi-John as a Black woman named Lina who came to England as Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting. Based on an actual historical figure, the show thoughtfully fictionalized her struggle between her loyalty to Catherine and her love for her Moorish husband, Oviedo, and their twin boys as xenophobia rises throughout the kingdom, and Catherine’s marriage to King Henry VIII unravels.The series is set in the 16th century during a historical epoch in which slavery and race were not inextricably linked to each other. Here, Lina’s brown skin merely indicates her foreignness rather than marks her oppression, giving us insight into how such differences were interpreted and experienced before anti-Black racism was codified in Europe (and the Americas) as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.By the time we reach the early 19th-century world of PBS’s “Sanditon,” however, the long arm of the slave trade has reached the British seaside resort of the title. Adapted by Andrew Davies from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, “Sanditon” expands the story of Miss Georgiana Lambe, Austen’s first Black character. Described briefly (and offensively) in the manuscript as a “mulatto” born to a white slaveholding father and enslaved Black mother in the British colony of Antigua, Georgiana in the series is an heiress, played by Crystal Clarke, whose wealth and exotic beauty make her the most sought after young woman in England’s south coast. Ultimately, I found Georgiana’s rarefied status to be the show’s biggest representational challenge: As I reveled in her splendor, I also found myself forgetting the enslaved labor that created it.Crystal Clarke as Georgiana Lambe in “Sanditon,” a series adapted from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen.Credit…Simon Ridgway/PBSBut racial trauma remains. Despite the attention that she receives, Georgiana is ultimately alienated in England because of her race, an experience that I found more realistic than Marina Thompson’s (Ruby Barker), another biracial debutante who also finds herself alone at court in “Bridgerton.”Other complex portrayals of Britain’s participation in the slave trade can be found in Amma Asante’s standout 2013 movie “Belle,” or in Pippa Bennett-Warner’s character on Hulu’s “Harlots,” who lives as a free but formerly enslaved Black woman in London in the 1780s.I’m also looking forward to the mini-series “The Long Song,” debuting later this month on PBS. Based on Andrea Levy’s novel of the same name, it unfolds at the dawn of emancipation in Jamaica in the 1830s. It is another story of England and the central role its Black subjects played in building its wealth and grandeur under King George and Queen Charlotte’s rule, though we’ll probably see far fewer corsets and society balls.By avoiding both slavery and the fervent British abolition movement that flourished in London in the early 19th century, “Bridgerton” ultimately opts for “Downton” escapism over a nuanced exploration of real-time racial dynamics, mostly relegating such aspects to the story’s past. In flashbacks we learn that the first Duke of Hastings was ruinously consumed by his newfound status, demanding, to the point of verbal abuse, absolute perfection from his wife, who dies in childbirth, and his son, who stutters as a child. (Shades of Papa Pope of “Scandal,” who once admonished his daughter, “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”)With more seasons presumably to come, given the show’s popularity, I’m curious how far “Bridgerton” is willing to depart from Quinn’s novels in order to fill in the worlds of its other Black characters, especially Black women like Lady Danbury, Queen Charlotte and Madame Delacroix. They are the show’s most intriguing characters and they remain mostly unexplored — will they eventually be afforded as much complexity as the duke? As Daphne’s entire family?In a society in which gender and sexual mores dominate the actions and attitudes of all its characters, I want to see how these women learned to navigate those same structures differently shaped than everyone else. Because despite Lady Danbury’s beliefs that love conquers everything, I could not help but think that history ends up validating the duke’s skepticism and his sense that Black progress is always a fragile thing.But who knows? Maybe if I knew how Lady Danbury or Queen Charlotte came to be, I’d be so convinced that I’d finally be able to revel in a past that I haven’t quite seen myself in before.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More