Netflix cracked the code with Bridgerton: take a big, gossipy Regency world, cast it with extremely good-looking people, crank up the yearning, and let the corsets do the work. But Shondaland’s Julia Quinn adaptation is only one doorway into a genre absolutely stuffed with candidates for the next binge-and-swoon hit. Historical romance has spent decades building series with the exact ingredients for a streaming hit. We’re talking interconnected families, slow-burn couples, ballroom scheming, brooding heroes, and wallflowers with quivering pens.
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Here are the books, each the launch pad of a series, that could carry a Bridgerton-sized franchise. Some are frothy, some are filthy, all of them are ready for their streaming close-up.
‘This Earl of Mine’ (2019)
Bow Street Bachelors Series
Image via MacMillan
Bridgerton meets Bond. That’s the whole pitch here, and honestly, who is saying no to that? Kate Bateman blends Regency romance with spy-caper plotting, which hands an adaptation two hooks for the price of one. You get ballroom and back-alley intrigue with This Earl of Mine and both should come with a warning. If you already suffer from heart problems, read with caution.
Georgiana Caversteed is a wealthy heiress with a fortune-hunting cousin closing in, so she does the only sensible thing and marries a condemned prisoner in Newgate, fully expecting to be a widow by morning. Small hitch: her convenient groom, Benedict Wylde, hangs around instead of, you know, just hanging. He’s a nobleman working undercover as a Bow Street agent, and now the two of them are stuck in a marriage neither planned, tangled up in his dangerous investigation and their own inconvenient chemistry. Benedict isn’t the only spy here, as Bow Street Bachelors follows a trio of aristocratic secret agents, an ensemble that basically writes the “and next season” pitch for you. It’s fast, flirty storytelling, and propulsive enough to hook viewers who swear they don’t even like period dramas.
‘The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels’ (2021)
Dangerous Damsels Series
Image via Berkley Books
Okay, this one’s different. Cecilia Bassingthwaite is a well-mannered Victorian lady who also happens to be a pirate, part of a secret society of genteel women who steal, scheme, and fly around England in enchanted houses. When a charming assassin named Ned Lightbourne is hired to kill her, the two of them fall into a courtship conducted mostly through banter, poisoned tea, and aerial battles between floating manors.
India Holton writes historical romance the way Wes Anderson makes movies. There’s so much wit and impossible whimsy and gorgeous nonsense delivered with a completely straight face. For a streamer looking to break out of the standard period mold, this is the wild card, a fantasy-adjacent romp that could look like nothing else on the platform. The Dangerous Damsels series has the visuals, the feisty heroines, and the deadpan comedy to become a genuine cult favorite. Someone give the flying houses a big VFX budget and let this thing soar.
‘A Woman Entangled’ (2013)
Blackshear Family Series
Image via Bantam
Kate Westbrook wants back into the society her family got quietly shoved out of. Her father, a gentleman, married an actress, and the whiff of scandal has trailed the Westbrooks ever since. Kate’s plan is to charm her way up the social ladder, and she does not have time for Nick Blackshear, the family-friend barrister who is quietly, hopelessly in love with her and carrying his own reputational baggage after his brother married a former courtesan. The two of them keep getting thrown together on errands that neither one wants… at least, outwardly.
If Bridgerton is the fantasy version of the ton, Grant writes the grounded, realist version, where a person’s whole future can hinge on who their brother slept with. That’s catnip for a certain kind of viewer, the Sanditon and Belgravia crowd who like their romance with real social consequences underneath. Nick and Kate smolder in a slower register, and Grant’s Regency London feels more lived-in than gilded.
‘Wicked and the Wallflower’ (2018)
Bareknuckle Bastards Series
Image via Avon Books
Felicity Faircloth is a wallflower with a fatal flaw: she can pick any lock in London, and she picks the wrong one, stumbling into a moonlit deal with a Covent Garden crime lord who calls himself Devil. He runs an ice-smuggling empire with his brother out of the city’s underbelly, and he’s plotting an elaborate revenge against the aristocratic half-brother who left them for dead. Felicity’s little lie about being engaged to a duke turns out to be very useful to a man with a grudge. So he offers to make the lie true. Naturally, he ruins his own plan by falling for her.
This is the entry for anyone who found Bridgerton‘s ton a little too well-behaved. Sarah MacLean drags the glittery marriage market down into the alleys and back rooms, where the stakes are sharper and the banter has teeth. Devil and his brother Whit are pure prestige-drama material, two scarred men in beautiful waistcoats moving through a London that Netflix hasn’t fully mined yet. Give this a season, and you’ve got the grimy, sexy counter programming to all those pastel garden parties.
‘The Duchess Deal’ (2017)
Girl Meets Duke Series
Image via Avon Books
Picture Beauty and the Beast if the Beast were a very hot, very grumpy duke, and you’ve basically got The Duchess Deal. Tessa Dare writes the funniest dialogue in the business, and this one is a full rom-com in Regency drag, filled with quick verbal sparring and slow-melting hearts. The comedic zip is exactly what makes Bridgerton rewatchable, and Dare has it in spades.
The setup: George, Duke of Ashbury, comes home from war scarred, furious, and in need of an heir. Emma, a seamstress and jilted vicar’s daughter, marches into his house to collect payment for a wedding gown and leaves with a marriage proposal built on pure cold logic. He wants an heir with zero emotional entanglement, she wants security, they shake on it, and then the whole tidy arrangement goes gloriously off the rails. The Girl Meets Duke series keeps every couple this light and this charming. A recipe streamers would be smart to option in bulk.
‘The Heiress Effect’ (2013)
Brothers Sinister Series
Image via Courtney Milan
Meet Jane Fairfield, the most undesirable heiress in England. She wears the ugliest gowns money can buy, says the most outrageous things at dinner, and repels suitors on purpose, all so she can stay near the younger sister she’s protecting. Enter Oliver Marshall, a duke’s illegitimate son with a rising political career and a very inconvenient attraction to the woman everyone else finds unbearable. Oliver wants respectability. Jane is a walking scandal. You can see the problem, and you can absolutely see the appeal.
Courtney Milan builds her world out of ambition and politics as much as romance, and The Heiress Effect carries a progressive slant, including a tender interracial subplot that most Regency novels of its era wouldn’t touch. That gives an adaptation something Bridgerton fans already prize: a diverse, socially conscious sensibility that doesn’t feel bolted on. Jane is the rare heroine written to be too much on purpose.
‘Bringing Down the Duke’ (2019)
Image via Berkley
Oxford, 1879. Annabelle Archer is a vicar’s clever, penniless daughter and, as one of the first women admitted to the university, she throws herself into the fight for women’s suffrage. Her assignment: win over the powerful Duke of Montgomery, a cold, controlled man whose support could change everything. What she does not plan on is the two of them striking sparks off each other at every turn, her fire against his ice, until neither one can remember why they’re supposed to hate each other.
This is the smart, feminist period piece that a certain audience has been begging for, with real suffragist history threaded through the swooning. Enemies-to-lovers is the most reliable vehicle for the romance genre, and Evie Dunmore steers it beautifully, pairing a heroine with actual political stakes against a hero who has to decide what he’s willing to risk. The League of Extraordinary Women books follow a whole circle of Annabelle’s activist friends, which means a series has its next three seasons of protagonists already sketched out.
‘Duke of Sin’ (2016)
Maiden Lane Series
Image via Grand Central Publishing
Valentine Napier, Duke of Montgomery, is a blackmailer, a manipulator, and quite possibly a genuine monster. Sadly, he is also the most magnetic man in any room he enters. Into his household comes Bridget Crumb, a housekeeper with a spine of steel and a secret mission of her own, there to quietly retrieve a cache of incriminating letters before her employer can weaponize them. What she doesn’t count on is the duke noticing everything, including her, and finding himself unexpectedly undone by the one person who refuses to fear him.
Elizabeth Hoyt goes darker and hornier than most of the genre, and Duke of Sin is a masterclass in the morally gray antihero, the kind of character TV can’t get enough of right now. The sprawling Maiden Lane series spans dukes and street toughs alike, offering the kind of range a long-running show would need. Valentine alone is worth a season pick-up.
‘The Arrangement’ (2013)
The Survivors’ Club Series
Image via Piatkus
This is the one that makes viewers cry… in a good way. Mary Balogh is the genre’s great chronicler of genteelness, and The Arrangement is a tender, healing love story between two people the world had written off. Think Bridgerton, but with tissues. Vincent Hunt, Viscount Darleigh, lost his sight in the war and spends his days fending off relatives determined to marry him off to whoever suits their purposes. Sophia Fry is a poor relation treated like unpaid help by her own family, invisible right up until the moment she steps in to save Vincent from a marriage trap. Grateful and a little desperate, he proposes a practical arrangement of their own, and the marriage they build for convenience slowly becomes something neither thought they deserved.
The larger Survivors’ Club series follows a found family of wounded veterans helping each other back to life. Basically, it’s an ensemble premise practically built for a years-long run.
‘Devil in Winter’ (2006)
Wallflowers Series
Image via HarperCollins
Here is the villain redemption arc that every other author in the genre is still trying to beat. Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, spent the previous book in this series being a genuine cad, and author Lisa Kleypas hands him a whole novel to get his rotten heart rearranged by the last woman anyone would pick for the job. That woman is Evie Jenner, who has an abusive family, a dying father, and one wildly reckless plan: propose marriage to the most dangerous rake in London, so nobody can force her into anything worse. Sebastian says yes mostly because he needs her money, and off they go to Gretna Green, where a marriage of pure convenience slowly, deliciously blossoms into the real thing while he trades his scoundrel reputation for a job running her late father’s gambling club.
Kleypas is the reigning queen of the reformable bad boy, and this is her crown jewel. The Wallflowers quartet also comes with a built-in ensemble of four best friends plotting through the marriage market together, exactly the connective tissue a streaming series feeds on. One swoony central couple, three more waiting in the wings.
Bridgerton
- Release Date
-
2020 – 2026-00-00
- Network
-
Netflix
- Directors
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Tom Verica, Tricia Brock, Alex Pillai, Alrick Riley, Bille Woodruff, Cheryl Dunye, Sheree Folkson, Julie Anne Robinson
- Writers
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Abby McDonald, Sarah L. Thompson, Daniel Robinson, Oliver Goldstick, Leila Cohan-Miccio, Azia Squire, Sarah Dollard, Eli Wilson Pelton, Janet Lin
-
Luke Thompson
Lady Violet Bridgerton
-
Ruth Gemmell
Benedict Bridgerton
