American imperialism is hard to avoid at present, whether that’s on the evening news or our small screens. Bridgerton – based on books by an American author, created by an American writer, and broadcast by an American streamer – is the most American show on television right now. Don’t let the fact it is set in Regency England – drawing from Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë – mislead you. As it returns for its fourth season, Bridgerton seems ever more content to lean into its Yank conventions.
Having cycled through the most immediately appealing of the Bridgerton sprogs, the gaze of this fourth instalment alights upon Benedict (Luke Thompson), the debonair second son. “Where is Benedict?” comes the despairing cry of his mother, Lady Violet (Ruth Gemmell), forever frustrated by her son’s ambivalence towards social mores. But that loftiness is challenged when he meets a mysterious lady at a masquerade ball. Who is she? Why does her understanding of the Ton seem to derive mainly from Lady Whistledown’s gossipy pamphlets? And can he track her down with just her lost glove? It turns out she’s Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), the eldest daughter of the late Lord Penwood, who has been relegated to servant status by her domineering, malevolent stepmother, Lady Penwood (Katie Leung). Sophie even has two frustratingly pampered stepsisters – yes, this season on Bridgerton, we’re doing Cinderella.
“Everyone knows reformed rakes make the best husbands,” Lady Penwood informs her daughters. And this seems to be the message of Bridgerton each season. First Regé-Jean Page’s Duke of Hastings, then Jonathan Bailey’s Viscount Bridgerton, and, last season, baby-faced Colin Bridgerton, played by Luke Newton. And so, Benedict’s gradual realisation that he must replace his libertine bisexuality with contented hetero monogamy is just Bridgerton being Bridgerton. The show – created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland – has managed to take the conventions of the period drama and distil them into something even more conventional. It is the closest a human could come to creating an AI slop Regency romance: distilling plotlines from classic novels and fairy tales, generating consistently perfect facial bone structure, rendering everything in lurid, over-saturated colour.
And yet, Bridgerton remains perfectly enjoyable. Luke Thompson – having played triangle at the back of the Bridgerton family orchestra – makes for a surprisingly effective lead. And Yerin Ha, stepping into the saga for the first time, is an engaging heroine, even if her character is impossibly perfect (and has an accent that migrates between England and Australia like a junior doctor or pilates instructor). “You are not like the other young ladies,” Benedict tells Sophie. “It is a relief.” Their romance is not quite as racy as that of Phoebe Dynevor’s Daphne and the Duke, but Bridgerton’s sensibility has always been more tell (with heaving bosoms and naked arses) than show (with implicit longing and unrequited fascination). The show’s creators know what their audience wants – a dashing aristocrat, a (seemingly) impossible love story, three-piece suits and floaty dresses and finger food and cups of tea – and they deliver.
The fact that it is a fantasy is entirely transparent. This is the product of Anglophile Americans’ fascination with the British class system, but it has somehow become the most important piece of original IP for Netflix, since the end of Stranger Things. It is perhaps only time before they build an Austenworld theme park on the outskirts of Bath. And yet despite all the cynicism this project arouses in me, the latest season of Bridgerton is reliably pleasant to watch. Bridgerton deploys its familiar formula for a fourth time and – shockingly – achieves much the same result: a sexy American soap opera in bonnets and bodices.
