Bridgerton’s Long-Awaited Benedict Season Plays It Too Safe

Four seasons in, we know what to expect out of a Bridgerton arc. A new class of Regency London singles enters the marriage market, navigating a gauntlet of balls under the mercurial eye of a control-freak queen who lives for the drama and the pseudonymous gossip columnist who chronicles her progress. Each social (and TV) season focuses on a different noble, wealthy, and gorgeous Bridgerton sibling—of whom there are, conveniently, eight. Every romance begins with a meet-cute, progresses through an excruciating will-they-or-won’t-they, surges somewhere around the midpoint of the season with an explosion of lust, briefly dissolves following a blowup or the revelation of a dark secret, but is repaired in time to culminate in perfect marital bliss.

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It’s a formula, but that’s fine. One pleasure of genre fiction is the comfort of repetition, and a core requirement of romance is a happy ending. Still, five years into its tremendously popular run, the Bridgerton template is showing signs of wear. The new season’s lead—Benedict Bridgerton, a louche aspiring artist played by Luke Thompson—would seem to present the ideal opportunity to switch things up. Instead, we get an extremely familiar story that, while packed with endearing performances and never less than bingeable, plays it disappointingly safe.

Releasing in two parts of four episodes apiece (the second half will arrive on Feb. 26), Bridgerton Season 4 takes place in the wake of a seismic moment for Mayfair: the unmasking of wallflower Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) as ton crier Lady Whistledown. Now, Pen is married to her childhood crush, Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton); mother to an adorable baby; and operating out in the open as a sort of gossip advisor to Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel). But when the sovereign forgoes her annual debutante “diamond” and instead anoints the season’s most eligible bachelor, Pen fails to dissuade her from picking Benedict. 

What’s wrong with Benedict? In the words of his own mother, Lady Violet (Ruth Gemmell), he’s a rake. Unlike his put-upon but increasingly absent elder brother, Viscount Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey), this second son feels no obligation to keep up appearances. When an exasperated Violet bursts into his bedroom late one morning, she finds him asleep under the covers with one woman while another snoozes on a nearby chaise. During the confrontation that follows, Benedict informs her: “It is unlikely that I will ever marry.” The trouble, he claims, is that “the eligible ladies of the ton, many of them are lovely, but they all have the same dream of marriage. They display no true animation, no zest for life, no personality. I am charting a more venturesome course, outside good society. In doing so, I am being true to myself.” Spoken like a true pseudo-bohemian trust-fund dilettante, an archetype as old as dynastic wealth. 

“You simply have not met the right young lady yet,” is Violet’s reply—a comment that 21st century viewers will recognize as a cliché among parents in denial about their sons’ sexual orientation. Benedict is, indeed, queer. He explored bisexuality, last season, with help from his older, widowed paramour, Lady Tilley Arnold (Hannah New), and her other boyfriend, Paul Suarez (Lucas Aurelio). Apparently, it wasn’t an isolated adventure. Less than a third of the way through the Season 4 premiere, Benedict enters a wild party through a red beaded curtain and locks lips with a bearded hunk named Louis (Sachin K. Sharma), not to be seen again until he rolls up conspicuously late to the first ball of the season: Violet’s masquerade.

It’s there that Benedict meets the woman who is to be his love interest and ultimately, I presume, his wife. (I’ve only screened the first half of the season, but again, this is Bridgerton.) Sophie Baek, played with intelligence, wit, and pluck by Yerin Ha of Halo, is intriguing to Benedict because she seems so out of place at a ball where he’s swarmed by jaded husband hunters. This Lady in Silver is not looking for marriage, she tells him; she can’t even dance. He confesses to the fellow outsider that he feels like an “imposter” in high society, and they share a masked kiss. Then the clock strikes midnight, and she flees before Benedict can learn her name or glimpse or face. All he has to go on is the glove Sophie left behind.

If this sounds like a certain relentlessly retold fairytale, well, yes. As in Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books, Sophie is basically Cinderella. An illegitimate child of Lord Penwood (Arthur Lee), she’s downgraded to maid by her cruel stepmother (Katie Leung) when he passes away. There are also two stepsisters, neither ugly but one quite bratty. (Never mind that Penelope comes from an almost identically structured household. I’d always assumed the Featheringtons were the show’s nod to Cinderella.) Do you even need me to tell you that the glove becomes Benedict’s glass slipper, as he interrogates deb after deb in a quest to find the one woman he might actually want to spend his life with?

This is hardly the first Bridgerton storyline to crib from the Western canon. Season 2’s courtship of Anthony and Kate (Simone Ashley) riffs on The Taming of the Shrew. Nor is it wrong to draw inspiration from classics. It’s just a bummer to see the series’ most audacious character relegated to the most traditional of love stories. Benedict is straight in the novels. Sophie is white. But creator Chris Van Dusen, showrunner Jess Brownell, and their Shondaland team have consistently found ways to make their show’s anachronistic Regency setting more reflective of the world contemporary fans live in. If they can give us string quartet covers of Third Eye Blind, why hew so closely to the plot of a romance that predates Jane Austen by centuries? It’s possible that more subversive stuff is coming in the second half of the season. But so much Disney-style saccharine, occasionally interrupted by Benedict’s vague hand-wringing about how he’s not like other boys, is at best a waste of time. Even his quick kiss with Louis has the feel of a focus-grouped scene tacked on to preempt accusations of straightwashing from fans (many of whom will have just spent two months savoring the unfettered homoerotics of Heated Rivalry).

The shortcomings of the Benedict-Sophie Cinderella story might have been easier to overlook if the side plots felt more vital and less redundant. Francesca (Hannah Dodd) and her new husband, John, the Earl of Kilmartin (Victor Alli), are facing the kind of marital setbacks we’ve seen whispered about and blushed over in seasons past; their arc is evidently heading somewhere novel, but progress is glacial. Violet’s “garden” has been “in bloom” since Shonda Rhimes’ Queen Charlotte spinoff slotted in between Seasons 2 and 3, yet her flirtation with the underwritten Lord Anderson (Daniel Francis) has been slow to bear fruit. I adored Eloise’s (Claudia Jessie) spinster vibe at first, but if I have to hear her give one more speech about it, I will arrange her marriage myself. It’s as though Brownell is keeping them all in suspended animation to avoid squandering precious material for their designated, forthcoming seasons. 

Bridgerton is not necessarily out of ideas. Like a solid couple that has settled into an easy routine, it simply seems stuck in a pleasant rut. Season 4 has many of the same elements that made past installments fun: the costumes, the Bridgerton family dynamics, the spectacle of each themed ball, Julie Andrews’ arch Whistledown narration, the female-gaze steaminess, Rosheuvel’s wonderfully imperious performance. And they’re all still fun here. The season has a few great new assets, too. Though we’re just meeting Sophie for the first time, Ha makes almost as compelling a female lead as Coughlan (and a better one than their predecessors). Even as I hope we see a more nuanced depiction of Benedict’s sexual fluidity in the second half of the season, there’s no question that Thompson and Ha have exceptional chemistry. Bridgerton remains an enjoyable romance. I just wish it had the courage to, as Benedict so self-righteously puts it, chart a more venturesome course—and give its hero a chance to do the same.