Bridgerton, aka Hunks in Landscaped Gardens It’s season three, and that means it’s the excellent Nicola Coughlan ’s time to come into her own as a romantic heroine while running a small- to medium-sized Regency influencing business. (She’s secretly the gossip-mongering pamphleteer Lady Whistledown.) From the 18th century on, fiction frequently focused on the need for respectable ladies to produce an heir.
These books didn’t spend much time on the actual process of producing an heir, however. Shonda Rhimes , Bridgerton’s executive producer, addresses this balance here. Period dramas were once all about nice frocks.
Bridgerton includes both nice frocks and a hunk-run frock-removal service. Upstairs, Downstairs The mother of them all. A long-running series, created by Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh in 1971, that lays bare the complicated class politics of a fancy London town house at the turn of the last century.
As both of their mothers were actually servants, Atkins and Marsh did not shrink from depicting upper-class complacency about poverty and the abject nature of the class system. However, to paraphrase Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, “That’s, like, just their opinion, man.” Downton Abbey/Belgravia/The Gilded Age Baron Fellowes of West Stafford had a very different perspective on all this for reasons you may be able to deduce from this sentence.
Fellowes watched Upstairs, Downstairs and thought to himself, Counterpoint: What if being posh was really lovel.