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.
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<em> </em>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
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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.
‘Wicked and the Wallflower’ (2018)
Bareknuckle Bastards Series
This is an entry for anyone who found Bridgerton’s ton too well-behaved.
