In the first episode of “Queen Charlotte,” a prequel spin-off of Netflix’s period romance hit series “Bridgerton,” we meet a young Lady Agatha Danbury (played by newcomer Arsema Thomas) in bed. Lips pursed, eyes averted, she’s on her back waiting for her much, much older husband Lord Danbury (Cyril Nri) to finish having sex with her. We watch her from above being roughly jostled about, our perspective that of Lord Danbury who either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the visible disgust roiling beneath his younger, detached wife’s flimsy mask of consent. Finally, he rolls to the side, satisfied and spent. “That…,” he pants, “was a good ride.” He plucks a pair of slimy, blackened dentures from his mouth and falls asleep shortly afterwards.
An unsettling incident bordering on marital rape becomes a running gag of sorts throughout three episodes.
Before watching “Queen Charlotte,” I’d never seen a complete episode of “Bridgerton,” never mind a full season. I had tried to jump on the bandwagon when the series first premiered in 2020, but the pilot just didn’t hook me. As the show quickly ballooned into a global phenomenon, so did the backlash from Black viewers frustrated by the show’s blatant colorism toward the handful of Black characters in the color-conscious cast. I figured the show just wasn’t for me and moved on. But three years later, a steady barrage of billboards showcasing a young Black woman royal with an immaculately styled afro convinced me to give “Queen Charlotte” a shot.
In her seminal essay on representation titled “Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks explains that “for black female spectators who have ‘looked too deep,’ the encounter with the screen hurt.” Having been burned by misrepresentation before, I buoyed myself with the frothiness of the fantastical backdrop before wading in to a fantasy from which Black women have historically been erased and overlooked.
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