Rhimes, Shonda

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares169 Views

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

    by

    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

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Television

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

      by

      #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