Bridgerton Season Four Continues To Play It Safe & Get Away With It, by Gracen Giles

To critique Bridgerton, one must understand it: it’s not prestige television, and it’s not trying to be. Lavish costumes, string covers of pop songs, and happily-ever-afters are in the contract, and for three seasons (ish), Shonda Rhimes and showrunner Jess Brownell have mostly honored it. 

Season four, which finished its two-part Netflix release on February 26, is Benedict Bridgerton’s chapter. The Cinderella-inspired plot is catnip for fans of the book, and the show deploys it with affection. The stars of this season, Luke Thompson and Yerin Ha, are undeniably sweet together. The second half of the season is a significant improvement over the first: stakes deepen, the main romance catches fire, and Benedict finally grows up a little. But there’s a nagging feeling that lingers after the final episode – one that has nothing to do with whether Benedict and Sophie end up together (they do, obviously) and everything to do with the show slowly eating itself. 

The most obvious criticism of Season four is that it’s a cliché, paint-by-numbers fairytale. Part one has the bones of a great romance without the marrow: Benedict and Sophie circle each other, the audience waits, the waiting drags, and the audience (me) eats it up. 

This is partially a structural problem. Splitting the season into two parts — something Netflix has done with Bridgerton twice — creates an artificial intermission in what should be a continuous emotional arc. Romance is not a genre that benefits from a month-long intermission. By the time Part two was released, some of the initial magic had faded for casual viewers, and the show had to work to rebuild what it never should’ve disrupted. The gamble that anticipation would deepen viewer investment was risky; instead, it reinforced the sense that Bridgerton is now being managed as a content calendar rather than a story.

Part two rescues the season. Once Benedict stops hesitating and Sophie stops pretending she doesn’t care, the show finds its flow. 

Every season follows the same structure: meet cute, complications, longing, revelation, blow-up, resolution. We know and accept this because it’s the nature of the genre, but it’s worth wondering whether the show can find new textures throughout, or if it’s just going to keep recycling the same template with a different Bridgerton sibling’s name at the top. Season two set the bar high; the tension between Anthony and Kate felt earned and specific in a way that allowed us to forget the formula. Season three faltered (a conversation for another time) because Colin and Penelope’s romance didn’t translate as well from book to screen. Production and plot choices were questionable; it didn’t reach for the extraordinary when the ordinary would do. 

None of this should suggest that Season four is a failure — it’s become a favorite season for me. Yerin Ha is incredible. Sophie Baek — renamed from the book’s Sophie Beckett to honor the actress’s Korean heritage — is the season’s diamond. Ha brings a toughness and specificity into the role that pops the fairy-tale bubble around her. Sophie isn’t waiting to be saved; she’s calculating every move in a world that gives her little room for error. When the show engages the class dynamics seriously, it gives the romance real stakes. 

The supporting cast makes the show. Adjoa Andoh’s Lady Danbury, navigating tensions between her loyalty to Queen Charlotte and her own autonomy, is given more weight this season. The young Bridgerton Siblings — Hyacinth and Gregory taking their first steps into society — add genuine warmth. Francesca’s arc was a clear season highlight.

Francesca’s grief arc works because the show took the time to make John Sterling a real person before killing him. The funeral episode is unlike anything Bridgerton has done before: not decorative, quickly unresolved grief, the orientation of a young woman holding herself by a single thread. The thread is that she believes she is pregnant and carrying a piece of John — but she’s not. Hannah Dodd’s performance in that scene, her breaking in her mother’s arms, may be the most heart-wrenching the show has been. 

The aesthetics, of course, are stunning. Bridgerton has always understood that its visual language isn’t a guilty pleasure but a deliberate choice. The show doesn’t want you to pretend you’re watching history, but it wants you to feel something, so it deploys every visual tool at its disposal to achieve that goal.

Netflix has confirmed Bridgerton for seasons five and six, and four Bridgerton siblings are waiting for their love stories. The show is, by any commercial measure, a behemoth, but success is also a trap. The more the show relies on its formula, the more it risks the kind of exhaustion that comes from formulaic boredom. 

Season four is ultimately a success — a charming, sometimes genuinely moving, frequently gorgeous success that does what Bridgerton has always done well. The formula is still working for now, but the question is for how much longer, and whether the people making it have the appetite for something riskier before it’s too late.