It doesn’t take long for Bridgerton—Netflix’s first series produced by Shonda Rhimes, based on Julia Quinn’s Regency romance novels—to get steamy.
Not even three minutes into the first episode, “Diamond of the First Water,” viewers get their first eyeful of bare bottom—courtesy of Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton. As the eldest sibling of the Bridgerton family, Anthony inherited the role of head of household since his father’s passing—but it’s immediately clear that this Bridgerton is more interested in carnal pleasure than patriarchal duty.
Throughout the first season’s eight episodes, sex is showcased as unabashedly as any other social activity—with characters copulating in an inspired array of locales, including, but not limited to, the bedroom, the library, the stairwell, beneath stadium bleachers, a rainstorm, and a picnic. Previously, because of the Regency era’s restrained societal conventions and the modern era’s rating constraints, sex in 19th-century period projects was mostly kept off screen and/or behind closed doors. But on Netflix, Bridgerton features enough sex to shock Jane Austen.
“It’s no secret that we’re inspired by eight really delicious romance novels,” explained Bridgerton creator Chris Van Dusen. “We knew that sex and sexuality were going to be a part of the show. I wanted the experience to not be so different from the experience of reading a romance novel in terms of thing feeling fun and sexy, a little bit dangerous, and a little bit of a wild ride at times. We wanted to leave viewers hot and bothered and breathless at points, but we never did an intimate scene when it didn’t serve a story. We weren’t being gratuitous.”
Indeed, a major story line for heroine Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) involves her sexual education.
“We see her awakening over the course of this season,” explained Van Dusen. “She starts out as this picture-perfect young debutante who knows very little of love…and nothing of sex.” That changes when she meets the smoldering Duke of Hastings, Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page). “Throughout the season, we get to watch her sometimes educate herself. Sometimes Simon educates her,” said Van Dusen. Those steamrolling sex scenes—which crescendo in the episode “Swish”—telegraph her transformation. “If the first season had a subtitle, I always said it would be ‘The Education of Daphne Bridgerton.’”
Julie Anne Robinson, who directed the first episode and “Swish,” said, “I couldn’t have imagined when I arrived in the U.K. the complexities of getting Regency clothes off people. It was just sort of mind-boggling the things that they would have worn and that they wouldn’t wear.” (Case in point: “Regency ladies didn’t wear underpants.”) Robinson has directed many love scenes in her career, but this was her first experience working with an intimacy coordinator—Elizabeth Talbot.
“She called herself kind of the stunt coordinator for sex scenes,” said Robinson, who said that she and Talbot worked together on the sex-education choreography. The story line, said Robinson, “is still enormously relevant to women today in many cases. Somebody said you could show that episode in schools, and you could say, this is an important story that should have been told.”