How High Stakes Keep Readers (and Viewers) Invested

Today’s post is by author and book coach Susanne Dunlap (@susanne_dunlap).

I’ve lately been on a kick of re-reading and re-watching my favorite books, movies, and TV series. This has enabled me to really dig into not just what drew me to them initially, but why I love them and how the writer achieved a result that pulled me in and kept me glued to the page or the screen.

Most recently I’ve been rewatching Bridgerton on Netflix. Wonderful acting, swoon-worthy costumes and sets, and pure romance in an idyllically integrated fake Regency setting—a recipe for escapism.

Until you get to the prequel, Queen Charlotte, that is. While it’s based on Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books (and Quinn collaborated), it’s written by Shonda Rhimes, who served as producer on the first two series. In a departure from the escapist romance characteristics, Rhimes takes a rather preposterous (but imaginative) premise in a direction that—to me—feels more weighty and important, as well as more compelling and dramatic. How does she do it?

The answer comes down to one key element. Stakes.

First, a little about the series

Queen Charlotte is still at heart a romance, with all the usual tropes. The meet cute, two protagonists starting out at odds, coming together, then being wrenched apart along the way to achieving their ultimate understanding. It’s an unequal partnership at first: the lofty king and the lesser foreign noble, forced into an arranged marriage.

But there’s much more to this story than the romance. Like the original Bridgerton stories, it’s rather a delicious and clever mixture of genuine history and sheer fantasy, taking as its “what if” the story of the mad King George III of England’s marriage to Charlotte of Mecklinburg Strelitz—a marriage that resulted in thirteen offspring—and making Charlotte not only someone on a lower social rung than the king, but also Black.

It’s the origin story, as it were, for the integrated world of Bridgerton. What the Regency Bridgerton universe presents as a fait accompli—a completely racially integrated society—Queen Charlotte exposes as an experiment that the dowager Princess Augusta found herself backed into out of necessity. It could have gone terribly wrong.

How does that affect the stakes?

In a romance, the internal and external stakes are often personal—which doesn’t make them any less real or compelling. But in Queen Charlotte, the personal stakes are amplified first by the historical reality, then by the fictional premise on a societal level.

The historical fact of George III’s madness in reality created perilous power vacuums in the stratified world of eighteenth-century Britain. The fate of an entire dynasty rested on the ability for the king to be suitably married and produce viable heirs who did not inherit his tendency to mental illness.

In the Bridgerton ecosystem, the foreign spouse-to-be, as I said, is not only more lowly, but also Black. This catches the court by surprise, and they solve the problem of public perception (admittedly stretching credulity) by pretending it was their intention all along, ennobling all the wealthy Black subjects in Great Britain (“the other side”) and inviting them to the wedding. An “experiment.”

This is a welcome change, but it’s also fraught with peril: If things go wrong in any way, the experiment will have failed and “the other side” risks losing everything.

Those two plot elements—the king’s madness and the society-level experiment—establish one stratum of stakes. They are interesting enough and complex enough to power a simpler story. But Rhimes is not content to stop there. Instead, she piles up and accelerates the stakes on multiple levels: personal, political, dynastic, romantic, and financial. Even better, all these high-stakes plotlines are timed to resolve, to traverse their different arcs, in concert.

With multi-layered plots, timing is everything

While the origin story itself could have been the sole basis of the series, instead Rhimes gives us two parallel timelines. Queen Charlotte appears in the early timeline as her younger self, the reluctant queen to be. In the other timeline, she is a mature monarch, holding together a realm with a puppet king who is unable to rule—and has no grandchildren to continue the line, despite their brood of thirteen.

Charlotte’s character in the first two Bridgerton series is that of a frosty, demanding queen whose main purpose in life seems to be to reign over “the ton.” The king is a shadowy presence, only appearing in cameos that serve to humanize her a bit.

The subplot related to the external stakes of “the other side” also echoes across both timelines. That is the journey of Lady Danbury, confidante to the queen and close friend of Violet Bridgerton in the more recent timeline.

In the earlier timeline, Lady Danbury becomes the conduit for the permanent changes that will result in the continuation of “the experiment.” She has the most to gain or lose depending on the outcome. In the later timeline, she has a less important role, but nonetheless bears a secret that has a direct connection to her friendship with Violet Bridgerton.

A ballet of partners and plots

Perhaps the most important element of the origin-story timeline resides in the character of King George. While he played only a minor role in the original series, in Queen Charlotte, he is co-protagonist. He literally embodies the personal, political, and dynastic stakes as a self-aware character who knows his condition renders him unfit to rule—and possibly dangerous to his unsuspecting queen.

Rhimes cleverly keeps the viewer in the dark at first about exactly why George behaves as he does toward his bride: avoiding her, keeping himself separate, making her excruciatingly lonely as a stranger in a land where she’s not allowed to forge her own friendships. We have an inkling—we know he’s got a mental illness, after all—but still, his actions seem excessive.

At precisely the point when his behavior becomes inexplicable to the viewer, Rhimes gives us an episode entirely from his POV. She peels back the curtain on what he’s been struggling with while Charlotte is feeling abandoned. A brilliant structural choice.

And what a struggle. George submits to torturous treatments in the hopes that he can be cured. Why? Not just for the sake of his realm, but for the sake of his relationship. It’s clear at this point that he is in love with Charlotte and cares for her enough to endure physical pain to keep her safe.

From this moment, the stakes just keep getting higher:

• Charlotte is pregnant. Will the infant inherit his father’s disorder?
• Lady Danbury’s husband dies. Are the newly bestowed titles to be hereditary, or will everyone on their side lose everything in a single generation?
• Parliament is looking for proof that the king is fit to reign. But George’s inability to address them threatens to have him deposed, leaving the matter of succession dangerously unresolved. Without George, the “experiment” dies too.

And if that isn’t complex enough, there is another subplot involving the Queen’s man and the King’s man that foregrounds an additional sticky contradiction: duty and passion.

A romance, with muscle

The coup de grace at the end of Queen Charlotte is the way Rhimes not only resolves the individual plot lines, but how she brings the two timelines together. The deep understanding Charlotte and George reach in the earlier timeline bleeds into the later timeline in an unexpected—and intensely poignant—way. And in the later timeline, Lady Danbury reveals her secret to Violet Bridgerton without saying a word about it.

Rhimes uses complication not just to keep the viewer guessing, but to continually amp up the stakes and make us more and more invested in the outcomes for the characters. Once you care about Charlotte and George, it’s impossible not to follow them to the end.

Those who dismiss the romance genre as formulaic and predictable miss the real artistry that those tropes and conventions can enable. In Queen Charlotte, the combination of Julia Quinn’s glittering fictional world and Shonda Rhimes’s instinct for stories that keep you glued to the screen episode after episode results in something worthy of admiration by a storyteller in any genre.

The bottom line: Don’t settle for the obvious and simple level of stakes for your characters, historical or otherwise. Challenge them, push them, give them meaningful—and high—stakes that are believable in the context of their world.

Your readers will be enthralled.

Susanne Dunlap

Susanne Dunlap is the award-winning author of over a dozen historical novels, as well as an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach in both fiction and nonfiction. Her love of history began in academia with a PhD in music history from Yale. Today, she lives, coaches, and writes in beautiful Biddeford, Maine.