Yeah, while I was sick my wife watched this in the room with me. I woke up to Mad king George and the Black Queen and couldn't figure out why many British nobles were black. Even explained, I still didn't get the seeming large numbers in the mix. When I saw the Shondaland production card, though, then I knew. They should have just made them all black and been done with it; made the villagers white or something striking. What I saw was almost Skinimax levels of Get down, although my wife swore it was often more tame. Of course with a black male lead and dainty white female lead, because <reasons>.
The show is not bad per se, its plot is typical of such fare set in the Regency Period (the comparison for me was made to 90's teen drama's for the plot). In the 1.5 episodes, I watched, the race issue faded as not a big deal. As my wife described it, it was "the world as MLK imagined it." In a not-insane world, this would even be laudable. Today, though, blue checkmarks are talking about how evil whiteness is, attacks on white people, and how spelling and grammar are a sign of "white supremacy". We don't live in a sane world.