Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story review: Netflix prequel proves deeper and more mature than its predecessor

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story opens with narration from Lady Whistledown (Julie Andrews), the Regency-era Gossip Girl who has always framed the series up to this point. It’s only a brief introduction, though – an essentially unnecessary reminder that this Netflix series is a work of fiction rather than a documentary, which, well, duh – and beyond the occasional comment here and there Lady Whistledown is mostly absent from Queen Charlotte.

That’s characteristic of the series, though, which often seems like a stripped down and pared back version of the show it spun off from: classical music in place of orchestral pop scores, darker colours in place of pastels, so on and so forth. It's still recognisably A Bridgerton Story, as the subtitle proclaims, but it’s also noticeably and meaningfully its own distinct piece.

Somewhere between a spinoff and a prequel, with returning characters from the parent show contextualising events in the past, Queen Charlotte charts the love story between a young Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and King George III. Golda Rosheuvel returns as Bridgerton’s Charlotte, playing matchmaker for her children in hopes of ensuring an heir among the next generation; India Amarteifio, previously of Line of Duty and The Midwich Cuckoos, debuts as a younger Charlotte on the eve of her wedding to the King of England. Both plotlines offer the typical Bridgerton-esque comedy and romance, alternating between farce and repressed (or not so repressed) longing when the moment calls.

Notably, though, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story largely eschews the early courtship – or, rather, covers it entirely in half an episode, with George and Charlotte meeting for the first time as she tries to escape their wedding – and focuses instead on what comes next, with Charlotte soon isolated in a world of blunt knives and sealed-shut windows. For much of the series, the relationship between Charlotte and George is colder and harsher than that of Simon and Daphne or Anthony and Kate, not just playfully adversarial but something with grit and steel; it takes on a tragic quality in the present day scenes, too, any grudging early romance tempered by the knowledge that the young and charming King George will one day be consumed by the madness he struggles to keep at bay. 

In the background, Queen Charlotte returns to one of Bridgerton’s central innovations – the colour-conscious casting that saw Regé-Jean Page cast as the romantic lead in a regency era drama, or indeed a Black actor cast as Queen Charlotte – and asks how that works in practice. The implicit backstory to Bridgerton’s world has always been that the marriage of George and Charlotte prompted sudden progress, and here Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story realises that, exploring the new Ton from the perspective of a young Lady Danbury (Arsena Thomas, as much the highlight of this series as Adjoa Andoh is the original). It’s hazy on the details sometimes – it has to be, for obvious reasons – but it’s one of the more compelling aspects of the series. 

The series is well-made across the board, from the casting – Amarteifio takes to the rhythms of the Regency era dialogue with aplomb, and it’s fun to see Holby’s Guy Henry as the 18th century equivalent of a neurosurgeon – to the typically handsome production values. It’s well-structured, too, avoiding the indulgences of Bridgerton’s second season and Inventing Anna that saw both overstay their welcome, and getting nice little resonances out of the story as it flits between each timeline. Plus, it has a real title sequence, which feels like a lost art in an era of streaming television. 

Unlike its predecessors, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story doesn’t adapt a novel by Julia Quinn. Instead, it’s an original story (insofar as history is an original story, but still) from Shonda Rhimes, who takes a much more central creative role here than she does on Bridgerton proper. There’s a bit of a sense that, after producing two seasons of Bridgerton, Rhimes wanted to do something that focused more fully on the characters and actors that caught her attention – and on the strength of this series, they’re clearly worth your attention too. 

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is available to stream now on Netflix. I watched five of a total of six episodes before writing this review. You can read more of our Bridgerton coverage here, listen to us discuss Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story on Screen Babble, and read more of our TV reviews here. 

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