Review: Netflix’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
When Queen Charlotte premiered on Netflix, it was billed as both a prequel and a reclamation—a love story about power, race, and madness told through the lens of empire and romance. What emerged is something richer than anyone expected: part origin myth, part emotional reckoning, and perhaps the most fully realized installment of the Bridgerton universe so far.
The series opens with the young Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (India Amarteifio) en route to England, her marriage to King George III arranged before she’s even seen him. In a scene that sets the tone for the whole series, she contemplates scaling the palace wall to escape her fate—until George (Corey Mylchreest), unexpectedly kind and impossibly handsome, convinces her to stay. What begins as a fairytale quickly deepens into a portrait of marriage as negotiation: two people struggling to love one another within the machinery of monarchy.
Amarteifio is incandescent as the young queen—proud, frightened, intelligent, and increasingly aware of the power she holds. Opposite her, Mylchreest’s George radiates vulnerability and charisma, his descent into mental illness rendered with rare tenderness. Their chemistry carries the show, but it’s the dual performance of Golda Rosheuvel as the older Charlotte that gives the story its weight. Moving between past and present, Rosheuvel makes us feel the distance between the girl who loved recklessly and the queen who learned to rule alone.
Creator Shonda Rhimes uses the Bridgerton aesthetic—its silk and strings, its swirling camera and orchestral pop covers—but layers it with emotional sophistication. The opulence remains, but here it serves something more intimate: a meditation on marriage, duty, and difference. The series also weaves in the “Great Experiment,” an imagined royal decree that integrates Britain’s aristocracy by elevating people of color. It’s pure fiction, of course, but in this fantasy Rhimes finds truth: a world in which power shifts because one woman dares to hold it differently.
Historically, the real Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) was a German princess who married King George III in 1761. She bore fifteen children, supported the arts, and watched her husband’s mind deteriorate under what we now recognize as bipolar disorder. Some scholars have speculated that she may have had distant African ancestry—a theory based on a portrait and genealogical speculation rather than concrete evidence—but Rhimes seizes that ambiguity as creative liberation. In her hands, Charlotte’s possible heritage becomes metaphor: an exploration of what it means to be “other” in a world that demands conformity, and how identity can become both armor and burden.
That blend of historical imagination and emotional realism gives Queen Charlotte its pulse. The writing is lush and deliberate, balancing grandeur with intimacy. The love scenes—fewer but more meaningful than Bridgerton’s—are less about seduction than surrender: to love, to vulnerability, to fate. The supporting cast, particularly Arsema Thomas as the young Lady Danbury, adds texture, grounding the romance in the politics of survival.
There are moments when the show strains under its own weight, trying to reconcile fairy-tale fantasy with the brutal facts of history. But its heart is steady. Rhimes refuses cynicism; she believes, fiercely, in the power of love as both rebellion and redemption. By the final episode, when the older Charlotte crawls beneath the bed to speak to her broken husband—their hands meeting in the dark—the series transcends costume drama and becomes something timeless.
Queen Charlotte is not history, but it is truth of another kind: a story about endurance, dignity, and the complicated grace of loving someone the world has already decided to pity.
