The television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes joined Netflix in 2017 for a reported $150 million. When her streaming bosses told her to “just make the shows you want to make,” they weren’t expecting her first idea to be a Regency period drama. “I don’t think they understood what we were doing,” she recalls, “but they were excited because I was excited.” It was an ambitious proposition: a dazzlingly expensive show about the love affairs and power struggles of a multiracial group of aristocrats in 19th-century London. But Bridgerton smashed Netflix’s record in 2020 for its most watched English-language show. Two years later, Season Two broke Bridgerton’s own record. In the series, Rhimes presents Queen Charlotte as a woman of color, which has brought accusations that she’s erasing Britain’s history of racism. But Rhimes doesn’t care. “We’re not trying to tell a history lesson,” she says. “It’s entertainment.” —Decca Aitkenhead

The third season of “Bridgerton” will be released in two parts, the first on May 16 and the second on June 13