Hacker Cinema
Bridgerton
2020 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Chris Van Dusen
Wealth, lust, and betrayal set in the backdrop of Regency era England, seen through the eyes of the powerful Bridgerton family.
6 positive3 negative16 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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29 comments on Hacker News
As I wrote elsewhere, I think TV is what is actually consuming cinema's lunch. The average hours spent watching TV have only gone up over the years, but the same is not true of film. Gaming as a "primary" hobby is also quite male-coded (women tend to play on their phones, but they spend by far the most amount of time watching trash tv and Bridgerton or whatever).
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
The Crown is absolutely a prestige TV show. Stranger Things is also high quality and high budget. You could probably include Bridgerton in there too, it's not my kind of show but I can still recognize that it's a well put together one.
Seriously?
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
Trash ? The Diplomat has as good a production value as any.
So does Bridgerton. Adolescence is basically a single shot marvel.
Others - Stranger Things, Money Heist, Black Doves.
Not to mention their true crime documentaries.
Warner Brothers makes quality content. I think this is an almost perfect fit.
Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.
Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.
“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.
The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.
I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.
Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.
Nobody Wants This; Bridgerton; Wednesday; Man on the Inside; 3 Body Problem; Emily in Paris; the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender; Love, Death, and Robots; How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast); Is It Cake?; Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney; and some others I’ve definitely had conversations about outside my own household.
Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent.
They also have continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
It might be a moot point anyway. If we can consider Disney a bellwether¹, expect more content producers to step back on the diversity front.
Personally I think it completely depends on the story and artistic direction. Wolf Hall (casting mostly reflects historical appearances of characters portrayed) can exist next to Bridgerton (explicitly colour-blind casting). Both have their merits.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/18/chanel-stewart-trans-actor-win-or-lose-disney-pixar-changes-character-cisgender
>we got our own celebrities and a way to talk about them
Maybe, but Gul Dukat isn't a celebrity, he's a character. The study isn't asking people about <character from currently popular movie or TV show>, but about real, living celebrities. If they asked about the #1 character in Bridgerton, whoever that is, that I think would be comparable.
It also doesn't help that they're mainly asking about current celebrities. A 60-year-old doesn't give a shit about the Kardashians or Justin Bieber. Obama probably. But some celebrity who was big 30-40 years ago would be of much more interest to them.
> - Macbeth is old fiction, but some approaches to adapting it are BETTER than others
I did say and mean that.
> - Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
That isn't what I said.
Do cast a black man, do call it Macbeth. But seriously, keep going. It's weird to set something in Medieval Scotland and make just one guy a-historical. Make half the cast black, or whatever. It's seems like restraint or half-measure to try to keep in tradition in every other way but a single character. There's no reason you can't go full Bridgerton. I think that would serve it better.
I hope that's clear. I'm not sure if you actually aren't capable of grasping, or refuse to do so because you'd rather project racism. It's a bit weird.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". I think if it feels coherent then it works.
> fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2
Dude. You brought up Gladiator 2, not me. Ask them why they're complaining, because I sure didn't.
> As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
I don't know anything about Gladiator 2 other than it's an entirely new spectacle.
Secret cinema Bridgerton was good https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/cinema/secret_cinema_bridgerton_london_immersive/16404
> Are there people to watch an "Adam Project" and a "Bridgerton" (I assume these are interesting shows) every month?
In case the specific shows threw you off, those were meant just as examples of quality. They don't mean that people would literally rewatch the same show.
As for are there people who watch shows every month? Absolutely, many people watch an episode of a show or a movie every evening.
I think if you wanted to do an alternate reality of slavery with white slaves captured in Africa, I don't think you'd get complaints from the "woke" except to the extent that it takes jobs
This is so far out of touch it's unreal.
Woke people are currently trying to claim that maths education is racist because too many famous mathematicians are white. And you're claiming those same people would have no issue whatsoever with making a TV show about the history of Africa in which the Africans were all depicted by white people? It's hilarious and sad that people are actually reduced to trying to claim that.
And no, Bridgerton is not some fantasy or alternate reality. For goodness sake. Absolutely nothing in it is out of place in any way for the time except the races of all the actors.
> in the history of England, the United Kingdom and the whole Commonwealth there has not been a single instance of a king or queen being anything other than - here comes the dreaded word - white.
This is, in fact, (while completely beside the point) wrong. There are several non-white Kings and Queens in the history of the Commonwealth; e.g., Mswati III of the Kingdom of Eswatini.
> what's the point of making them black?
What's the point of alternate history and historically-inspired fantasy? That's a kind of big question. Do you literally think every film or show should simply depict life literally exactly how it actually occurred at some time in the past?
> in the US, I guess you could make Lincoln, Washington and Reagan black.
Or make Lincoln a vampire hunter.
(Of course, there isn't a long history of rumors that Lincoln actually was a vampire hunter taking as their starting point a too-literal reading of contemporary descriptions probably meant as throw-away insults.)
The complaints about Bridgerton seem to be highly-selective blindness to the entire concept that overtly fictional entertainment is typically something other than an exact recreation of history. (And/or assertion that race is somehow a uniquely unacceptable thing to fictionalize for unspecified reasons.)
> watch Bridgerton (playing on my TV right now) and observe how half the people in regency England, including the Queen, are now black.
Bridgerton is not a documentary, or even historical fiction, it's a romance set in a fantasy setting largely spun off of an extended what-iffing of a long-standing popular (but rejected by all current serious sources) rumor about Queen Charlotte.
Not sure how it's existence supports claims that Netflix is “woke”; sounds a lot like the fringe Christian Right descriptions of any fiction including magical elements (but not exclusively explicitly Christian miracles) as satanic.
Everyone agrees that the word "everyone" in discussions is not be taken literally. Citation not needed.
Netflix is extremely woke. If you doubt this, go watch Bridgerton (playing on my TV right now) and observe how half the people in regency England, including the Queen, are now black. Then go watch Manifest, and observe that in the final episodes one of the characters suddenly starts talking about how the government is "putting people in cages", quite out of the blue.
That's just the last two shows watched in my household. Manifest isn't as woke as Bridgerton but ... let's just say none of the characters are suddenly espousing the wisdom of Adam Smith.
The reason I cancelled was a combination of not being particularly interested in most of the content (I liked Bridgerton though) and the fact that while they were boasting record profits, they hiked their price up. I remember back when their streaming service was new it seemed like they had every movie under the sun (or at least a lot more than they do now) but since every studio has decided to have their own streaming service, it's mostly Netfilx's own movies/shows. Some are good but they miss way more than they hit.
On top of that, raising the price in the same month that they announce record profits left a really bad taste in my mouth. I know they're a business, and businesses love to chase infinite growth, but that doesn't mean I have to like it or give them my money.
The best streaming service for my particular usecase, which is primarily watching wide release movies, has been hbo max/go/whateverthey'recallingitthisweek. They get most of the wide release movies I'm interested in, and for the older weirder niche stuff that they don't get, I just buy the dvd/blu-ray and throw it on plex.
> With Bridgerton you get the impression the aristocracy wasn't so bad as long as half of it is black
I think your mistake is reading Bridgerton as utopian political fiction and not a romance film with a fantasy drawn around combining exaggeration of a few specific facts of Regency England with a couple things drawn from modern Western race and gender politics is the context and engine of conflict.
> There's no classism or anything structural in that show
There is fairly intense classism in the show.
> In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character.
Minor nitpick: Hamilton, in fact, has a single explicitly-named on-stage POC character, though the part has no lines.
Major nitpick: you...did not understand a few layers of metaphor in Hamilton.
> superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
Hamilton rather directly talks about race, class, “and so on”.
not the OP and not so much politics but I found it decidedly weird how Sex Education which is set in a fictional town in the UK, is filmed in Wales, with an almost exclusively British cast is completely Americanized.
As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
edit: another thing I just remembered, Netflix removed what is probably the best episode of Community from its catalog because of a blackface character, despite the fact that the character is explicitly used to address racism in the fantasy genre.
The series is consciously playing with race. Certainly Charlotte didn't look like that, but her slightly-mixed racial background was inspiration for designing the character that way. Similarly, her costuming is patterned after pre-revolutionary France.
Other Regency-period movies are probably more accurate with respect to people's complexions -- pasty white, uniform, and bland. Bridgerton isn't designed to give you a photograph of what you might see were you in the Regency court.
Rather, it's designed to give you a sense of what it might have felt like: diverse, colorful, exciting. To focus on Charlotte's face is to miss the ways in which everything about the show is inauthentic -- the clothing, the language, the dances -- but also deeply in love with the period that inspires it. The couldn't have played with the tropes so consistently without knowing them very, very well.
There is also a lot more to be said about the way real race affected real people at the time. We should have more TV shows and movies, rather than this being the only one.
> Netflix is on the very fast downward slope
I don't think the data is proving this out at all. Streaming will probably be a winner-take-most market and Netflix is on track to remain the leader.
We'll see what total 2021 subscriber growth was on Thursday, but estimates for Q4 are still around a net addition of 8 million subscribers. Compare this with Disney Plus growth in the same period of 2 million subscribers and I think the results are quite favorable.
If you pay attention to the details, such as in earnings calls, executives have reported that average subscriber watch time has only been increasing over the past few quarters. (Also see refs such as: https://backlinko.com/netflix-users#time-spent-with-netflix)
Keeping in mind that Covid has slowed production of content, in 2021 Netflix still managed to create the two most watched movies _ever_ on the platform (Red Notice, Don't Look Up). There are follow-up seasons launching for at least three of their strongest series, including Witcher (released tail end of 2021), Bridgerton, and Stranger Things. Plus the regular spikes of culturally relevant content such as Squid Games, Cheer, etc. which now happen fairly often.
> is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place
I'm not sure how you are inferring that the business model has been destroyed here. It's certainly evolving over time but the promise has always been 'pay us a monthly subscription and we'll give you lots of things to watch'. I don't see how that has changed meaningfully or negatively.
Netflix has had naysayers at every stage of its growth. The landscape is always changing but I believe the critical idea is that Netflix leads in streaming and this has only strengthened over time. Total subscribers, revenue per user, and watch hours per account are all drifting up, and I fail to see how that represents a downward slope.
In the related blog post, they say:
Regencycore follows cottagecore and cabincore in referring to a distinctive fashion aesthetic, in this case one inspired by Georgian styles made popular by the TV show Bridgerton.
I also thought the term "vaccine hesitancy" might be a candidate for inclusion.
It has 1 billion more total hours viewed in the first 28 days than the highest ever English TV show (Bridgerton)
The Bridgerton example is silly and not comparable. His character is barely in the other books, so of course he's not in the other seasons. It's like asking why Professor Quirrell isn't in the second Harry Potter film.
In my background I taught high school English for a few years, and while I wasn't that great at it, I will always remember when a student's eyes lit up when something clicked in their heads. When a joke Shakespeare made finally made sense, or when the magic of poetry moved them to tears, or when they found themselves surprised to relate to Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. In that sense, being a manager is also about being a mentor. Helping an engineer fix a bug, resolve an interpersonal conflict, improve their mental well-being, help them level up their careers... all of that is rewarding. Helpful. Making things better. And that's just awesome. Who wouldn't want to do that?
While I have been extremely privileged in my life, I have also suffered through some personal tragedies and lived with things I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, and those were things that were and are beyond my control. So in many ways, I crave control over my life and my destiny, and that's something I'll never have if I'm on the receiving end of a to-do list. The higher up I go in an organization, the more control I have over my destiny. I can choose which projects I want to work on, and I can delegate the things I don't. (In reality, I often find myself taking the projects that others do not want to do, but since it's my choice to do so, I still satisfy my objective.)
I am not interested in micromanagement. I do not rule by iron fist. I believe that I cannot make you do anything you do not want to do. I operate by consensus and collaboration, by radical candor, and by building trust with my teams so that when I ask them to do something, they want to do it because they trust that I have their best interests at heart, and that I'm not going to screw them over. In many ways, this is the reward for me.
I've been a loner my entire life. I don't have many friends. The friends that I do have all moved away over the years, and so now my social life is almost entirely online. But having a team that I can talk to at work, that trust me and believe in me and whom I can trust and believe in, that root for me and my success just as much as I root for them and theirs... That fills a lot of that void in my life, and it helps a lot in my quality of life. You don't need to be a manager to have this, but it helps. Most engineers operate in very small silos, but as a Director-level, I get to interact with a larger team of dozens of people per day. It helps.
In many ways, the reasons I wanted to go into management have to do with filling the voids in my own life: my feeling of lack of control, my lack of great social skills and close friends, my imposter syndrome, my desire to make a difference in the world, my disabilities and my weaknesses.
A computer will exactly what I ask it to do, without question and without deviation, for better or for worse. It doesn't talk back, it doesn't get excited when a problem is solved, it doesn't invite me to its weddings or birthday parties, it doesn't want to talk about the latest Bridgerton/The Expanse episode, it doesn't do anything except execute on its own code.
But a human? That's a whole different ballgame. Humans are challenging and frustrating, addicting and rewarding. And I hope that at the end of the day, when my employees sign off and go spend time with their friends and family, that they've contributed something to themselves or to the world around them. Kind of cheesy, but it's how I feel on my good days.
Hope that helps.
I wish the title had not been edited from its original: "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny." It captures so much better the essence of this rambling incomprehensible thesis that action movies have many beautiful people not having any sex. Alternate title: "Everyone drives cars in cities and no one is seen parking." To use his example, Starship Trooper is an action movie with satirical subtext, it is not served by having more horny people bang. Every narrative has to be edited to GET TO THE POINT. And then he leans on this faulty premise to criticize a bunch of weirdly unrelated stuff, movies made after the 90s, the cluttered interiors, McMansions, swoles, BMIs and 9/11. What?
There's plenty of beautiful naked people having sex on screen, uncomfortably many. Where has this writer been? The Tudors, anachronistic boobs and asses and fornicating beautiful people since 2007. This formula was so successful it's repeated in Games of Thrones, the trope so commonly employed it earned the moniker of "sexposition", naked people banging + dialogue = sex + exposition. It's also repeated in Versailles, Outlander, and from what I've seen of ep.1 Bridgerton. There's also plenty of beautiful people having sex, or at least demonstrating their horny-ness in RomComs, Sleeping With Other People comes to mind. Somehow I don't think the author was the audience for any of the above. He's complaining that there's not enough horny people in the movies he is watching.
I wonder if the answer isn't more mundane, money. Parents today seem to have no problem with their children seeing a movie where people are eviscerated on screen but won't let their kids see movies with sex in them. I found it funny that "Bridgerton", and "Game of Thrones" both produced with more sex, have been quite popular.
I think it's mostly just a way of making the show more visually interesting. Take a look at those dance scenes, and then compare it to a shot from any other regency romance movie. The faces in the latter all just blend in to one another; everything looks like a big blur.
The ethnicity is largely ignored. There's one interesting passing reference to it -- the idea that it's a recent phenomenon that could easily be reversed -- but they spend little time on it.
It's not authentic, but of course nothing about Bridgerton is authentic. Queen Charlotte's skin color is no wronger than her clothing, which is more 1770s France than 1810s England (and not really authentic at that, either). The Duke of Hastings' skin exactly matched that of the real Duke of Hastings -- since Hastings was a Barony.
Bridgerton at least was written by an American novelist and then made into a TV show by an American director / writer / producer team for an American media company.