Period pieces are having an extended moment in the spotlight. Regency era English period pieces are having an even bigger moment if the success of Bridgerton is anything to go by. We spoke with creator and showrunner Chris Van Dusen about bringing his lavish TV series to the screen and asked him what intrigued him most about the era. “It was a time of excess and beauty. It was over the top.” He was captivated by the dancing, costumes, jewels, glittering ballrooms and big country homes of the time. “It was a time that provided an amazing escape.” And escape is something audiences crave right now. The TV writer set out to write something unexpected, intriguing and delightful to capture the Regency spirit.
Despite the sense of luscious excess, the Regency era also provided a clear set of rules to keep things in check. “There was an order to it. People knew what was expected of them and how to behave accordingly.” The morality of the times has a remarkable tenacity and is still relevant today. “There was dating back then, but it was called courting. Instead of apps, they did it in ballrooms.”
Chris Van Dusen had rich source material to base his television series on. Julia Quinn wrote a series of best-selling eight novels with the same name. “I found them funny, emotional, and sexy. It all came with an incredibly charming family at the center of everything.” Van Dusen’s aim was to create the look and feel of a period TV series he’d never seen before. His underlying goal was to turn this traditionally constricting genre on his head.
Creating Queen Charlotte
Apart from the refresh during the adaptation, the screenwriter searched for a way to inject race into Bridgerton in this traditionally white world “with a contemporary sensibility about it.” One of Chris’ early tasks was to create the character of Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) who wasn’t in the novels. Queen Charlotte was allegedly England’s first queen of color despite debate on her African heritage at the time. Having an established queen of color on Bridgerton resonated with Van Dusen. “I wanted a multi-hued and multi-ethnic show,” he continued. Aside from race, the TV writer wanted to explore other contemporary topics like class, gender, and sexuality.
Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) Photo by Liam Daniel/ Netflix
Underneath the glamor of Bridgerton, there is running commentary that “over the years everything has changed, but nothing has changed, especially in love, courtship, and marriage.” He avoided the romanticized versions of love, by demonstrating that not every courtship results in a happy ending. “Love can be messy. It can be born of passion, beauty, loss, or pain. There is a real universality there, especially to a modern audience.”
The question of marriage is posed several times throughout Bridgerton. Why do people marry? Is it for love? Is it for money? To start a family? Is it a way out or a way through? Is it how you survive?
Adapting Bridgerton
Many show creators compare their TV shows to existing ones in order to guide the development process. Chris Van Dusen admits he didn’t have any comparables to guide him. He set out to make the TV show he wanted to watch. “From the beginning, I never wanted Bridgerton to feel like a typical period piece. I wanted the audience to have the same experience as reading a romance novel. It was a little dangerous, but fun. It left the audience hot and bothered at times.”
There is no escaping from comparisons drawn with other extravagant period pieces like Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey. Van Dusen embraced the comparisons and “turned up the volume while paying our respects to them.” Bridgerton certainly pushed the boundaries with what a period piece could be. He used some familiar tropes while tossing unexpected, sometimes dangerous, elements into the mix.
Ultimately, a successful television show all comes down to character. “Bridgerton is a show about marked, funny, and tortured people. Their lives are messy. Their love lives are even messier. These are women and men figuring out who they are and how to love and have relationships.” The show is also about the moments that make the audience glued to their screens. He cut his teeth writing relationship dramas on his previous TV credits “in a way that didn’t feel preachy.”
Chris Van Dusen (wearing headphones) on the set of Bridgerton. Photo by Liam Daniel/ Netflix
Van Dusen considers the first season of the show as “the education of Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor). She starts as a picture-perfect wide-eyed debutante and grows into a strained woman who discovers what she’s capable of.” Daphne is navigating a complex system of courtship she never knew existed. “There was a real vulnerability to her.”
She explores a variety of mindsets that have been normalized over time such as sexism, misogyny, and patriarchal structures. “These were the thirsty moments of the show.”
Chris Van Dusen opted for a diverse TV writers’ room to bring a variety of opinions to the room, not just in terms of demographics, but their relationship to the source material. Some writers were long time fans of the Julia Quinn novels and some never read them until they joined the writing staff.
For the most part, the characters stay true to the novels. In the TV series, Van Dusen wanted to emphasize the love in the Bridgerton house – their lives, their spirited banter, the way the brothers tease each other, the sisters always being there for each other, and the main love story between Daphne and Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page). “This was the bedrock of the first season. I wanted to make it as moving, sweeping and beautiful as possible.”
Julia Quinn who wrote the novels read all the scripts and was a huge supporter of the show from the beginning. She admitted that she never would have approached the adaptation of Bridgerton in Chris Van Dusen’s way, but after having read the scripts, she was convinced it was the only way to do it. It was imperative to get the adaptation right because these books are beloved and have a passionate fan base around the world. Van Dusen felt a “healthy” pressure to please the fan base of the novels.
Bridgerton is such an expansive show with dozens of characters. This encouraged Chris to balance so many characters and tell his stories more efficiently and economically. There were the Bridgertons and the Featheringtons. There was Queen Charlotte and her world. “We had to give each character their due and jump from story to story and family to family seamlessly,” he said.
According to the TV writer, character is always the most important aspect of the story. “You can’t just write cool moves. You have to know your characters and dig them into a hole so you can figure out a way to get out them of it.”
