«Bridgerton», between intrigue and matriarchy the signature of Shonda Rhimes

One thing is particularly successful at Shonda Rhimes, to tell with the enthusiasm of extraordinary events the unbearable banality of everyday life, and with the same enthusiasm to infect those who are watching his television series. Last but not least, Bridgerton. The Netflix production, released online on Christmas Day, would have nothing special. Like the eight-novel saga to which it is inspired, it tells of a love between kids, in the most complex setting of the Regency England.

There is a bit of history, gorgeous costumes and reconstructions that have nothing to envy to the most famous series, The Crown e Downton Abbey. Then, there is an intertwining – deliberately complex – in which one seems to see everything: the fable of Cinderella, the daring of Jo March, the morbid fixation of Gossip Girl and political fiction, the advent of a matriarchy announced (or so we imagine) with the same pride displayed by Nairobi in The House of Paper.

Bridgerton, the first costume series Shonda Rhimes ventured to produce, is extraordinarily mundane. It’s already seen, mince. Yet, looking at it, one soon finds oneself enveloped within the story, and there is a submissive resignation in all of this. Because Shonda Rhimes, glorious mother di Grey’s Anatomy e Scandal, it has something magical and the magic, you know, is all here: in its ability to make unmissable what, on paper, could easily be lost.

Bridgerton is the story of an English debutante, Daphne Bridgerton, whose beauty is such that it has bewitched the Queen. Her Majesty has called young Bridgerton the “diamond of the season,” the girl at whose door the longest queue of suitors England has ever seen. The same one that the little one is, however, ready to send elsewhere. Daphne, the eldest of the Bridgerton daughters, has made up her mind that she wants to marry for love. Thus, together with the Duke of Hastings, she hatches a plan that allows her to choose her future husband for herself, without the mediation of her brother Anthony, who took the role of head of the family when his father died.

The couple pretends to be close-knit, Daphne with the aim of arousing the jealousy of good parties, the Duke to deceive the mothers of high society, he decided to feed him his own daughters, and Lady Whistledown, a Gossip Girl ante-litteram. Whistledown is a mysterious lady who periodically publishes a free leaflet on which she tells all the darkest secrets of high society. The scandals, the ambitions, the perversions. Anything that could bring down the beautiful English castles. Even that of the Queen, whose desire to couple her nephew, Prince of Prussia, with Daphne Bridgerton will soon have to clash with the love she discovers she has for the Duke.

The series, in eight episodes, thus becomes a great melò, of which the link between Daphne and the Duke is just one of the many pieces. Bridgerton it is the love (banal, very banal) between the couple, the search for the identity of Lady Whisteldown, the subtle rebellion of Eloise Bridgerton, who would like to vote her life on writing. It is Miss Thompson’s lonely pregnancy, the illicit love between Anthony Bridgerton and a soprano. And then, again, the ordeal of Queen Charlotte, sublimation of every character that Shonda Rhimes has ever created.

The QueenAbsent from Julia Quinn’s books, she is a black woman whose marriage to the king (who later went mad) allowed her to open the doors of high society to Afro-English people. Carlotta is Annalize Keating, Olivia Pope and Meredith Gray: everything Rhimes has ever fought for. IS Bridgerton it is his kingdom: a revisionist matriarchy, in which women are the engine of a society that would have liked to have them, only, as wives and mothers.