Three seasons in, Netflix’s hit series is still endless ballrooms and gowns
In the latest season of Bridgerton, viewers are treated to the long-awaited romance between fan-favorite spinster gossip columnist Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) and her longtime crush, Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton). The series maintains its signature confectionery charm, much like its preceding installments, with an abundance of stunning visuals—gorgeous people, exquisite dresses, and meticulously manicured landscapes. Despite its Regency-era setting, the portrayal of a lush, verdant London devoid of smoke lends the story a timeless quality.
This polished aesthetic has become synonymous with Bridgerton. While its debated multiracial casting choices have been accompanied by modest attempts to contextualize Black participation in the aristocracy, the show's world feels somewhat detached from historical realities, existing in a space that seems to transcend time and place. However, this detachment adds to the show's allure, making it an enjoyable watch. Other series, like Apple TV+'s The Buccaneers, have attempted to replicate Bridgerton's frothy and entertaining atmosphere, with varying degrees of success.
However, this time around, after watching the batch of episodes released as Part 1 of this new season, I—much like the “on-the-shelf” Penelope—confess myself exhausted by standing at the edges of all these endless ballrooms, watching these sumptuously dressed rich people do their dancing and exchange their speaking glances. After the fourth or so installment turning on the events at so-and-so’s musicale or so-and-so’s luncheon, I find myself thirsting for a different setting and different stakes. That second-season flirtation between Eloise Bridgerton and the young printer’s apprentice was awkwardly executed, but Lord help me: 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 is what the source material—the Bridgerton novels, by Julia Quinn—is like too. Very 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 outskirts of the narrative, remaining hypothetical and never threatening the Bridgertons, who are, after all, the people we care about. This family is, thanks to their late father’s and then their punctilious oldest brother Anthony’s fine management of their estate, represented as being quite financially secure. Their unhappiness, if they have any, is in their heads. For the non-Bridgertons of page and screen, questions of financial ruin often loom but never quite seem to strike. The second-season heroine, Kate Sharma, had a “shopkeeper” father and needs to marry her sister off to someone in the aristocracy in order to secure financial support; the Featheringtons always seem to be barely evading some kind of disaster. But at the core of the story is comfort and abundance.
even takes the first two seasons’ few actual working-class characters, the Mondriches (Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi), and makes their young son a baron through the death of some distant relative. Now the Mondriches are no longer a boxer and his wife, or even the owners of a gentleman’s club, as they became in Season 2: They are, like everyone else, patricians of leisure. They must reconcile themselves to upholding aristocratic propriety by eschewing work, concentrating instead on planning the best possible parties. That means the small escape from the ton that the Mondriches offered is gone; we’re back on the edges of the ballroom, seeing who’s looking at who, again! My feet are tired.
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