From the start Bridgerton was a period drama for people who didn’t think they liked period dramas. When Shonda Rhimes, the award-winning writer and producer behind Grey’s Anatomy and CEO of her own company, Shondaland, told her producing partner of 20 years, Betsy Beers, that their next project would be set in Regency England, Beers was taken aback. “I thought you might have hit your head,” she says.
History was not their thing. But Rhimes had been sick while on holiday and all there was to read in her hotel room was one of the Bridgerton books by Julia Quinn. “I couldn’t put it down,” she says. “I’m not going to diss Jane Austen, but this was so much juicier.”
Bridgerton is more like Gossip
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