The fourth season of Bridgerton, now streaming on Netflix, shifts its focus to Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), the second son. Lady Violet (Ruth Gemmell) despairs of his ambivalence toward social conventions, but his detachment is challenged when he meets a mysterious woman at a masquerade ball. She is Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), the eldest daughter of the late Lord Penwood, reduced to servitude by her stepmother, Lady Penwood (Katie Leung). The season follows a Cinderella plotline, complete with a lost glove and a search for the unknown lady.
The show, created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shondaland, has been described as the closest a human could come to creating an AI-generated Regency romance. It distils plotlines from classic novels and fairy tales, features uniformly perfect bone structure, and uses lurid, over-saturated colour. Yet despite its formulaic nature, the season remains enjoyable. Thompson makes a surprisingly effective lead, and Ha is an engaging heroine, even if her character is impossibly perfect and her accent wavers between English and Australian.
Bridgerton's sensibility leans more toward explicit depiction than implicit longing, delivering what its audience expects: a dashing aristocrat, an impossible love story, period costumes, and tea. The show is a fantasy born of Anglophile Americans' fascination with the British class system, but it has become Netflix's most important original IP since Stranger Things. Despite the cynicism it arouses, the latest season is reliably pleasant to watch, a sexy American soap opera in bonnets and bodices.
