In a series 1st, Bridgerton’s new season spotlights a queer storyline. Fans have thoughts

For the first time, Bridgerton will focus on the lesbian love story between two woman leads — telling the story of “world-traveller Michaela and grieving widow Francesca,” played by Masali Baduza and Hannah Dodd, respectively.

Netflix announced the casting and narrative aspects of Bridgerton‘s fifth season earlier this week, alongside a teaser trailer depicting the main characters standing alongside one another holding hands. 

Since its release in 2020, the Regency-era (late 18th to early 19th century) romance following the eight siblings of the Bridgerton family has experimented with different aspects of inclusion. An ethos of “colour-conscious” casting led to a significantly diverse cast from its first season, including a Black monarch and an East Asian family introduced in the most recent season. 

The new focus in Season 5 follows minor queer themes explored in the first season, which were further cemented in the third and fourth seasons. Michaela and Francesca also appeared in previous seasons, though sapphic storylines have never taken a prime place in the show’s narrative before. 

“I’ve said from the beginning that this show, in so many ways, is about allowing people to see themselves represented, allowing themselves to dream, and imagine themselves in these fantastical roles,” showrunner Jess Brownell said in a press release from Netflix. 

“It never felt right to not be inclusive of queer love as well within that fantasy.”

Brownell stated years ago she planned on specifically developing Francesca’s storyline over multiple seasons.

WATCH | Bridgerton Season 5 teaser:

The focus on Francesca and Michaela in Season 5 also comes after Julia Quinn, who wrote the novels on which the show is based, told Cosmopolitan that she would love to see a gay main character on the series.

But it also follows sustained criticism levied against the show. The show’s choice of casting Black actors, while sometimes acknowledging and other times ignoring their race in the narrative itself, sparked an early controversy.

“Bridgerton ultimately opts for Downton [Abbey] escapism over a nuanced exploration of real-time racial dynamics,” Salamishah Tillet wrote for the New York Times. 

Meanwhile, W Magazine’s Brooke Marine argued that the show’s decision to variously ignore race, then occasionally have only the Black characters mention it, was a sort of “inconsistent racial politics” that postured at making a larger, societal point without ever actually doing so.”

And in a recent New York Times guest essay, Jayashree Kamblé — an English professor who researches romance novels and narratives — criticized the newest season’s attempt to “offer a modern, feminist approach to the genre” at the cost of crafting a compelling romance. 

“This sort of performative progressiveness feels like a fake orgasm,” Kamblé continued. “Everybody knows it’s not sincere and no one is happy.”

Fan debates

That type of criticism follows a recurrent push-and-pull around Bridgerton‘s queer storylines. Some complained that certain characters in the first season were queer-coded without explicitly stating it. Then there was a backlash when some of those characters were acknowledged as queer, turning the subtext into text.

“The source of the problems is fans who resent Julia Quinn for dealing with [production company] Shondaland and Netflix to begin with,” entertainment writer Amanda-Rae Prescott told The Guardian about that backlash. 

“They wanted the world of Bridgerton to remain white and heterosexual — to the detriment of expanding viewership among people of colour and queer audiences.”

There have also been discussions around Netflix’s Season 5 announcement.

On one hand, focusing on Francesca for this season continues a trend that began in Season 3 that has rankled some fans.

In Quinn’s original novels, each book focused on a few main characters out of the wider cast, including a Bridgerton sibling.

While the show’s first and second seasons primarily focused on the same principal characters as Quinn’s first and second books, the third went out of order. If the series were to go back to the books’ order, Season 5 would focus on Eloise (Claudia Jessie) instead of Francesca. 

“You’re absolutely joking me…. Eloise pushed to Season 6?” wrote one fan on X. “Claudia is going to be pushing 40 by the time they film are you serious.”

Meanwhile Michaela, introduced at the end of Season 3, was genderswapped from the same character named Michael in the books, causing its own wave of controversy.

Earlier this year, Baduza responded to fans’ ensuing assumption that Michaela and Francesca would eventually become the show’s first openly lesbian lead storyline.

“Everyone deserves to be represented,” she told Refinery29. “I think we’re excited to see these stories get told.”

Netflix’s various social media posts teasing the new season were each followed by fans debating the pitfalls and merits of focusing on a queer love story. Pre-emptively addressing some of those complaints, Brownell was quoted in Netflix’s release as saying that this season would focus primarily on Michaela and Francesca’s love, instead of dour tragedy. 

“What is most exciting about Season 5 is that it is going to be a season about queer joy. It is not going to be a season about queer trauma,” she said. 

“There are going to be difficulties for the characters and conflict in the same way there is for every Bridgerton character. But we are still always grounding our love stories in the fact that this series is about joy. It’s about humour.”