Bridgerton was starting to feel a bit labored. Every season, Lady Whistledown’s omniscient drawl ushers us back into a sugar-coated version of Regency-era Mayfair as the ton eagerly awaits this year’s debutantes. The images are familiar: excitable young ladies newly loosed into society swarm around eligible aristocratic bachelors in public parks while their over-eager families patiently await gentleman callers to whisk away their daughters. Add a dash of anachronistic string-quartet Taylor Swift covers, some insane costumes and the inevitable bouts of carriage-based passion, and the formula is firmly re-established.
In its fourth edition, though, Bridgerton has finally got its mojo back, thanks to its most compelling love story in years. This time, the focus is on the second-eldest Bridgerton son, the lothario bachelor Benedict, who strikes up an unlikely Cinderella-style romance with newcomer Yerin Ha as Sophie Baek, a maid who is secretly the illegitimate child of Lord Penwood. Truly, dearest reader, this is the best Bridgerton romance — and season — since the brooding relationship between Regé-Jean Page’s hunk Simon Basset and Phoebe Dynevor’s Daphne Bridgerton, the couple responsible for catapulting the Netflix show to stratospheric success in 2020 (with the help of a particularly racy staircase moment).
