More Period Pieces Should Take the ‘Bridgerton’ Approach to Music
Marcus Jones
Dearest readers: It’s Bridgerton Week at IndieWire. We’re celebrating the new season by diving deep on one of the best romance shows on TV.
When “Bridgerton” first premiered on Netflix at the end of 2020, one could argue it was received with fascination above all. Though executive producer Shonda Rhimes had already built up a brand with elements that viewers would expect from every TV show that bears her name, this collaboration with creator Chris Van Dusen was taking a lot of big swings in its attempt to adapt Julia Quinn’s beloved romance series.
There was the diverse casting, the idea that it was taking the romance TV genre to the most mainstream platform it has ever had, and that it was a costume drama with a noticeable budget at that, but one innovative piece of its success that goes underwritten is the inclusion of an anachronistic score.
Now adding contemporary music to a period piece did not start with “Bridgerton.” Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” using ’80s new wave to soundtrack a few scenes comes to mind as a relatively recent example. But the innovation with “Bridgerton” stems from composer Kris Bowers’ orchestral arrangements of recent pop hits like Ariana Grande’s “Thank You, Next” that play during pivotal scenes in the series.
Conceived in collaboration with Season 1 music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, and continued with Justin Camps, the musical move follows the same thought process as the show including a cast from a wide array of backgrounds, there is a newfound accessibility for audience members who may not have first thought of themselves as the target audience for the show, without really shirking genre conventions. We get the instrumentation that would be true to the regency era that “Bridgerton” is set in, but the more familiar contemporary music better invokes what emotional beats the scene is trying to convey.
For example, take the Season 2 scene soundtracked to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” where Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) dance together for the first time. Sure, it is novel to hear a song one may recognize rearranged in that fashion, but familiarity with its lyrics puts a button on a nonverbal, yet extremely communicative scene meant to display the fraught nature of the two characters’ indisputable chemistry.
The “Bridgerton” effect has certainly gone noticed, with similar series like “The Gilded Age” on HBO and “The Buccaneers” on Apple TV+ having gained traction since its premiere. But only spinoff “Queen Charlotte” has made the attempt to marry the past and present with its score. Though Bowers may be too busy to help out elsewhere (he just became an Oscar-winning filmmaker as well,) it would be sort of a shame for “Bridgerton” to be the only show to invest in this kind of orchestration.
Not only has it contributed to the narrative comprehension without being too distracting, it falls in line with how younger audiences have begun interacting with music, speeding tracks up, slowing them down, flipping them, and rearranging them for the sake of TikTok. “Bridgerton” Season 3 keeps the trend going with inspired new takes on songs like “Jealous” by Nick Jonas and “Happier Than Ever” by Billie Eilish, but it is high time for other series to take a risk and follow suit.
