Full spoilers below for all four episodes of Bridgerton Season 4, Part 1. Episodes are streaming now on Netflix.
Dearest Gentle Reader,
A new season of Bridgerton is upon us. Romance is in the air. Mystery abounds. And enchantment is sure to appear around every corner. This season, one Benedict Bridgerton – the second son of his esteemed family – takes center stage. A notorious rake, Mr. Bridgerton is a man of contradictions. A bachelor in his prime, he is infamously averse to marriage and enraptured with nothing more than merriment and frivolity. Will the roguish gentleman ever settle down? Or is he destined to a vapid life of purely carnal pleasure? If a new mystery lady has anything to say about it, Mr. Bridgerton’s lifelong bachelorhood may not long for this world. And this author is intrigued as to what will happen next.
OK, enough of that. As you may have heard, Bridgerton, the mega Netflix romance series from Shonda Rhimes, returns for Season 4, and it’s as sumptuous and quivering as ever. The first four episodes, available now on Netflix (you’ll have to wait until February 26 for the rest), focus on Benedict (Luke Thompson), who’s constantly hounded by his mother (and nearly everyone else) to settle down and find a wife. That is, until he meets a mysterious masked woman (Yerin Ha) at a masquerade ball and falls head over heels for her.
The rest of what follows is a literal Cinderella story (seriously, many of the plot points are a beat for beat rehash of the classic story or Disney movie; take your pick). The masked woman is in fact a maid named Sophie, whose noble father died leaving her to fend for herself with a wicked stepmother and stepsisters. Benedict, her “prince,” searches for her using nothing more than a memory of the lower half of her face and a left-behind piece of clothing (in this case, a glove). Cases of mistaken identity, stolen glances, and copious dancing ensue. You’ve seen it all before. And that’s the main problem with this season of Bridgerton.
While the performances are as sharp as ever and the chemistry between the leads simmers to the point of boiling in scene after scene, there’s not much here that hasn’t been done already (and better) in previous seasons of the Netflix drama. Boy meets girl. Girl fancies boy. But they can’t be together (at least not yet) for insert your reason here.
Bridgerton, once a mile-a-minute feast of mystery and smut, seems somewhat blunted now that most of the breakout characters have either left, having been coupled off in their own seasons, or had their screen time severely diminished. It’s somewhat understandable as these departures are mainly a function of the plot – this is Benedict and Sophie’s season, after all. But you can’t help but feel the loss of Anthony and Kate’s (Jonathan Bailey and Simone Ashley) smoldering will-they-or-won’t-they love/hate relationship or Penelope Featherington’s (Nicola Coughlan) double life as Lady Whistledown. (The all-seeing scribe still factors into the new season, but her bite and influence has been severely diminished by her public unveiling in Season 3.)
Season 4 does its best to try and fill these gaps with new subplots. Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) has an almost falling out with Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) over the former’s desire to move on to a life away from the Royal Court, leading to a series of surprisingly intense scenes that show two actresses at the top of their game. Matriarch Lady Violet Bridgerton’s (Ruth Gemmell) secret relationship with Lady Danbury’s brother (Daniel Francis) is another. Seeing how the crushing weight of societal expectations affects multiple generations of Bridgertons is both saddening and (by the end of the fourth episode at least) titillating all at once. These storylines try to make up for the absence of the previously featured Bridgerton siblings and their now-spouses. But those are big shoes to fill. And these subplots, interesting as they are, are little more than slight decorations at a fairly drab party.
The main storyline is where Season 4 fails to meet the height of the preceding iterations of the show. Thompson and Ha are great, both individually and together. However, the increasingly ludicrous plot holds them back from reaching true “relationship goals.”
Look, I realize this show is not trying to be much more than frothy romance. But Benedict’s inability to realize the woman he’s falling in love with is the same woman he ALREADY fell in love with (albeit behind a mask) borders on the absurd. There’s only so much disbelief a viewer can suspend before getting distracted by the sheer ridiculousness of it all.
That’s not to say that Season 4, Part 1 of Bridgerton isn’t worth a watch. If you’ve followed the lives and tribulations of the Bridgerton siblings with a passion until now, you’ll still want to check in with what’s going on in Regency-era Mayfair. The performances are still fun. The sets, costumes, music (string covers of pop songs still abound), and scenery are as lavish and opulent as ever. But if you’re looking for the latest batch of Bridgerton episodes to kick the show into a new gear, you’ll be left out in the cold - like Cinderella's carriage stuck in the mud.
Time will tell, dear reader, if part 2 of Bridgerton’s fourth season provides the much-needed heat that fans of the show have come to expect (but the newest episodes decidedly lack). Until then, we’re left with a story this author considers not exactly cold but certainly not a piping hot cup of English tea either.
