There are maybe parallels with Julie Andrews, who played the queen of Genovia. You know what? That didn’t even occur to me. I was watching The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement yesterday and noticed some parallels with Queen Charlotte’s story - a young woman coming into her own and facing new royal responsibilities, a romance with someone she clashes with initially.

( Bridgerton mainstays Lady Agatha Danbury and Lady Violet Bridgerton get thorough backstories here as well.) Rhimes sees the series as being of a piece with Shondaland’s bigger mission in TV: “I’m really not interested in doing something we’ve done before.” But the romantic fantasy of Queen Charlotte traverses somber new ground, balancing a sweeping view of history with a more intimate exploration of grief, regret, and painful decisions. That changes with its new six-episode prequel, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, in which Rhimes uses the prickly, slightly unhinged monarch’s origin story to elaborate on one of the series’ haziest questions: Why are there so many Black aristocrats in Regency-era England? The show (and a new companion book co-written with Quinn) features all the Rhimes hallmarks: attractive young protagonists whose open disdain for one another belies the even more obvious sexual electricity an interracial romance set against a backdrop of professional and political intrigue quippy repartee women learning how powerful they are, and the forces that complicate and constrain that power and steamy bedroom interludes. The diamond of that deal so far has been an adaptation of the Julia Quinn period romance Bridgerton, now heading into its third season, a pandemic hit for Rhimes’s Shondaland production imprint but one she had never actually written for. (A lineup so strong the network gave Rhimes her own night: TGIT, or Thank God It’s Thursday.) But after a public falling-out with her longtime creative home, Rhimes left network TV for Netflix in 2017. Each took audiences on a savvy, soapy ride through the work and sex lives of a refreshingly multiracial cast of horny careerists while hauling in millions of dollars and eyeballs for ABC.

The Chicago screenwriter’s first megahit, the long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, premiered in 2005, while her most obsessed-over follow-ups, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder, redefined appointment viewing for the Obama era.

Of the television creators whose work possesses the authorial stamp and social heft needed to sustain an academic conference, as well as the fan devotion required to make them household names, Shonda Rhimes is in a tier with only Norman Lear.

Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes