Bridgerton is Starting to Feel Dull to Me

Three seasons in, Netflix's hit series remains stuck in an endless loop of ballrooms and gowns.

The new season of Bridgerton, featuring fan-favorite spinster gossip columnist Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) finally getting together with her longtime crush Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), continues to be as indulgent as its predecessors (or four, counting the prequel, Queen Charlotte). The characters are gorgeous, the dresses are stunning, the trees and vines are always perfectly manicured and in bloom, and the action unfolds in a London so green and smokeless that you’d barely know the story takes place in the Regency period.

This glossy smoothness is what we've come to expect from Bridgerton. Its much-debated multiracial casting practices, coupled with a minimal and, to me, unconvincing attempt at world-building to explain Black participation in the aristocracy, place this world slightly askew from history, largely unanchored in time and space. To the show’s credit, that’s part of what makes it so enjoyable, and other series, like Apple TV+’s The Buccaneers, have imitated this frothy-fun vibe with varying degrees of success.

However, this time around, after watching the batch of episodes released as Part 1 of the new season, I—much like the “on-the-shelf” Penelope—find myself exhausted by standing at the edges of these endless ballrooms, watching these sumptuously dressed rich people dance and exchange meaningful glances. After the fourth or fifth episode revolving around events at so-and-so’s musicale or so-and-so’s luncheon, I crave a different setting and different stakes. That second-season flirtation between Eloise Bridgerton and the young printer’s apprentice was awkwardly executed, but I missed it. Just as there are no seasons besides spring in the Bridgerton-verse, there are no real poor, working-class, or middle-class characters in this show. Even the servants don’t have lives. Everything exists to move the pretty people around the ballroom floor.

Of course, this mirrors the source material—the Bridgerton novels by Julia Quinn. Rarely does anyone who’s not a member of the aristocracy, or at least a wealthy parvenu like Penelope or the illegitimate child of an aristocrat, get a turn in the plot spotlight. Questions of impending deprivation are always kept at the narrative's outskirts, remaining hypothetical and never threatening the Bridgertons, who are the ones we care about. Thanks to their late father’s and then their punctilious oldest brother Anthony’s fine management of their estate, this family is portrayed as quite financially secure. Their unhappiness, if any, is purely internal. For the non-Bridgertons, questions of financial ruin often loom but never quite strike. The second-season heroine, Kate Sharma, had a “shopkeeper” father and needed to marry her sister off to someone in the aristocracy to secure financial support; the Featheringtons always seem to be barely evading disaster. But at the story's core is comfort and abundance.