Parents' Guide to Bridgerton: Season 1

In the oft-stuffy world of costume dramas, this series is a breath of fresh air, bringing with it a number of welcome innovations. Chief amongst them: diverse casting, with people of color in roles both major and minor, including Bridgerton's Big Cheese herself, Queen Charlotte, who is Black. Black actors also take on other prominent roles: Charlotte's head lady-in-waiting, Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh), and the male half of this season's chief couple, Simon Basset. Race doesn't seem to play much of a part in Bridgerton's social stratification; White and Black characters alike play servants and society members. It's quite a difference from the all-White casts in most corset-and-carriage dramas.

Bridgerton's other major departure from form is sexy sex, and lots of it. Though most period dramas confine displays of physical passion to a few stolen kisses or longing glances, Bridgerton's lords and ladies do it up against the wall, in niches at balls, in rented love nests. Much of the sizzle is doled out to Bridgerton's male characters, who won't, in the parlance of the time, be "ruined" by premarital carnal knowledge. But the women aren't left out, and their passions are depicted in ways viewers may not have seen before, with lots of attention to their pleasure and consent. In a milieu in which women's sexuality is often defined and controlled by men, Bridgerton's explicit placing of a woman's sexual power and pleasure in her own hands is positively revolutionary, and delightfully steamy to watch.