Why ‘Bridgerton’s best season might also be its most frustrating

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Bridgerton Season 4, Episodes 1-4.

Look, I didn’t expect to be writing about Bridgerton this year with anything approaching seriousness, or that Bridgerton Season 4 would be the series’s best season so far (though the hope was there). For three seasons, the show has been what it is, pretty much. It’s a confectionery fantasy. A place where the casting director said, “What if the Regency era, but make it joyfully diverse?” And everyone just went with it because, honestly, why not? The show’s given us instrumental covers of Ariana Grande songs played at fancy balls. It’s given us more heaving bosoms than a paperback romance shelf at an airport bookstore. And it’s been, in the parlance of our times, A Vibe.

But then Season 4 opens with something startling and (gasp!) new. We begin with a long tracking shot through the servants’ quarters of Bridgerton House. We watch maids baking scones, footmen polishing silver, cooks preparing elaborate meals. In other words, all the invisible labor that makes aristocratic leisure possible.

For the first time in four seasons, Bridgerton asks us to notice the people who’ve been in the background all along. The ones making sure Benedict’s cravat is properly starched while he’s busy having an existential crisis about settling down.

This is new and, perhaps surprisingly, interesting. 

The Cinderella problem.

Season 4 adapts Julia Quinn’s An Offer from a Gentleman, which is explicitly a Cinderella retelling. Benedict Bridgerton meets a mysterious woman in silver at his mother’s masquerade ball, they share exactly one (1) meaningful conversation and a kiss, she flees at midnight, leaving only a glove, and he proceeds to lose his entire mind trying to find her. Except—and here’s where it gets complicated—the Lady in Silver is actually Sophie Baek. A maid who snuck into the ball for one night of pretending she’s not illegitimate, overworked, and trapped in servitude to her cruel stepmother.

The Cinderella framework is both the season’s greatest asset and its biggest problem. It gives us clear narrative scaffolding (we know how this story goes). But it also creates space to ask questions the fairy tale skips over. What happens after the ball when Cinderella has to go back to scrubbing floors? What does the prince’s “rescue” actually mean when you’re this deep into thinking about power dynamics?

Because one thing about Cinderella that we don’t talk about enough is that it’s a story about marrying up. It’s a fantasy of social mobility through romantic attachment, a deeply conservative one dressed up in sparkly shoes. The happy ending requires external rescue, not self-liberation. And Bridgerton Season 4 seems genuinely interested in interrogating that… Right up until the moment it probably won’t be.

Benedict Bridgerton: himbo icon or privilege case study?

Luke Thompson is doing excellent work here as Benedict. He sells the “second son’s” instant obsession with the Lady in Silver. As well as his growing frustration at not being able to find her. And on top of that, his genuine tenderness toward Sophie when they meet again. Thompson makes you believe Benedict is falling in love twice without realizing it’s the same woman. That’s no small feat, given that this premise requires everyone to develop face blindness suddenly.

But the show is doing something more interesting than just watching a man pine. It’s building a case study in what privilege actually looks like when it’s wearing a nice coat and calling itself progressive.

Benedict considers himself the artistic one. The free spirit. The Bridgerton who questions convention. “Male Eloise,” essentially. And to be fair, he does wear his cravats slightly askew and has opinions about chiaroscuro. But when actually tested? When the choice becomes “marry Sophie and risk social catastrophe” versus “make her your mistress and keep everything comfortable?” Well,  turns out he chooses the option that maintains his position while pursuing his desire.

The “be my mistress” proposal that closes Episode 4 is devastating precisely because Benedict genuinely thinks he’s acting generously. He’s watched his friend Hiscox with his apparently happy mistress and concluded, “problem solved!” He cannot fathom why Sophie seems insulted by the “offer.” And why would he? In his world, mistress arrangements are common. They’re practical solutions to the class barrier problem, but they’re fundamentally exploitative. That leaves women with no legal protection. The same way Sophie’s own mother died as a mistress “with no title, no money, no dignity.” No wonder none of this makes sense to him.

This is what makes the season sharp when it wants to be. Benedict’s privilege isn’t necessarily malicious, but it’s inevitable. He’s never had to think about consequences because he’s never faced any that mattered. His “rebellion” has always been aesthetic and little else.

Showrunner Jess Brownell said in interviews that Benedict is “not as brave as he would like to be because he’s never really stepped out in a way where he’s had to be brave.” That’s it exactly. And it raises the central question of whether Season 4 is genuinely interesting or just well-executed fluff. Will Benedict actually become brave? Or will the plot manufacture some convenient legitimacy for Sophie so he doesn’t have to?

Sophie Baek and the weight of reflected reality.

If Benedict lives in fantasy, Sophie lives in reality. And the show clearly knows the difference.

Yerin Ha is a revelation this season. She plays Sophie with this incredible combination of guarded self-protection and barely suppressed yearning. Watch her face in Episode 2 when she’s standing outside the drawing room at Penwood House, watching Benedict chat pleasantly with her stepsister, Posy. You can see the moment hope dies.

She considered revealing herself, admitting she’s the woman he’s looking for, and ending this season about six episodes early. But then she sees him laughing with someone appropriate and realizes… Of course, he’s fine with Posy. Why wouldn’t he be? Posy can be acknowledged in daylight.

The flashbacks in Episode 2 do crucial work establishing Sophie’s specific trauma. Her father, Lord Penwood, appeared to love her but couldn’t or wouldn’t legitimize her. Her stepmother, Araminta, immediately understood what “ward” meant and spent years methodically crushing any hope that Sophie might dream of more than her station. When Araminta dismisses Sophie from Penwood House for attending the ball, she’s left with nothing. No pay (she’s never been paid). No references (Araminta poisons that well). And obviously, no family to turn to. It’s especially nice to see the show avoid the trap of romanticizing this instant precarity.

In fact, it’s what makes the Season 4 setup more pointed than previous years. Benedict can afford to be in love. Sophie can’t. For Benedict, the worst-case scenario is social embarrassment. For Sophie, it’s homelessness, unemployment, and the risk of starvation. The stakes are not remotely equal.

This is where the show’s class politics get seriously uncomfortable (in a good way). When Benedict rescues Sophie from assault at Cavender House in Episode 2, he’s being heroic, sure. But his intervention also gets both Sophie and her friend Hazel fired. Well-meaning aristocratic intervention still has consequences when you’re the person with no power. When he brings Sophie to Bridgerton House to work for his mother in Episode 4, he thinks he’s helping. And he is! But he’s also putting her in constant proximity to himself while remaining completely oblivious to how dangerous that proximity is for her.

The show keeps showing us this dynamic over and over again. Benedict’s privilege prevents him from seeing the risks Sophie takes simply by existing in his orbit.

The stairwell scene and what it really means.

The fact that Episode 4 ends with Benedict and Sophie on the servants’ stairwell is perfect symbolic geography.

Brownell has said the stairwell image was the first thing she envisioned when conceiving the season. These two characters meet “in the space between their two worlds, bridging the upstairs and the downstairs.” And it works because a stairwell is inherently liminal. It’s not a destination, it’s a passage. You’re always moving through it, going from one place to another. You can’t stay there.

When Benedict and Sophie give in to their attraction on those stairs, they’re occupying the only space where their worlds can intersect. But here’s the thing about liminal spaces. They’re temporary by definition. Eventually, someone has to go upstairs or downstairs. Someone has to return to their proper place.

So Benedict makes his proposal. And here’s where the show’s ambitions and its genre requirements slam into each other like two carriages on a narrow London street.

“Be my mistress.”

It’s the title of the source novel. It’s the central conflict. And the show handles it about as well as possible, given that it still needs us to like Benedict while having him propose something blatantly offensive.

Sophie’s reaction—that silent blink, the withdrawal, walking away without answering—is exactly right. She doesn’t dignify it with an argument. Nor does she bother to explain why it’s insulting (he should know). She just removes herself from his presence, from his assumption that his solutions matter more than her dignity.

But here’s my question: What happens next?

What’s next for ‘Part 2’? A few options.

We know how romance novels work. We know how Bridgerton works. This is a genre that requires a happy ending, and “Sophie remains a maid while Benedict marries some appropriate young lady” is not that ending.

So the show has to find a way to make Benedict and Sophie’s relationship socially acceptable. Which, in my mind, means it has basically three options.

Option 1: Benedict defies society.

He marries Sophie despite the scandal, accepts whatever social consequences come, and demonstrates actual bravery. This would be dramatically satisfying and thematically coherent. It would show that love actually can transcend class barriers when someone with power is willing to sacrifice that power.

But it would also require Benedict to risk everything: his family’s standing, his sisters’ marriage prospects, his entire social position. And nothing in the first four episodes suggests he’s capable of that. Not yet, at least. The show has been very careful to establish that Benedict is not, in fact, as brave as he thinks he is.

Option 2: Manufactured legitimacy.

Basically, the Cinderella thing. Society deems Sophie legitimate all along because her father arranged it that way, which would make sense because Araminta clearly hid it when he died. The show already telegraphed this during the funeral scene, and I’m pretty sure it’s how things will go. More or less.

Problem solved, right? Sure, yeah, except this completely undermines the class politics the show has spent four episodes establishing. If Sophie’s happy ending requires her to be retconned into aristocracy—even fake aristocracy—then the message is that love can only transcend class barriers if class barriers are secretly not real. It completely misses the point.

Option 3: Nuanced compromise.

This would be the hardest to pull off, but potentially the most interesting path. That is, a middle path where Sophie and Benedict’s relationship is acknowledged, albeit at real cost. Maybe Benedict’s family standing does take a hit. Maybe they end up living outside London society. And maybe there are real consequences that they accept because the relationship matters more.

In other words, this would require some sophisticated writing and a willingness to let the happy ending be complicated. It would mean the romance can work, but not everything else does. That love doesn’t conquer all. It just conquers enough.

Don’t hold your breath for Option 3. Bridgerton has never been particularly interested in complicated happy endings. But the first four episodes have set up the possibility so beautifully that we want to hope.

What about everyone else?

The ensemble stuff in Season 4 is admittedly rough. But there’s one subplot that does work well. And that’s Violet Bridgerton’s romance with Marcus Anderson.

The show lets Ruth Gemmell be the diamond of the season. More than that, it lets her be the sexual aggressor. When Marcus says he wants to take things slowly, Violet tells him to get undressed. When they’re in bed together afterward, she’s glowing with satisfied happiness. The show films this with the same romantic language it uses for younger couples, and that’s quietly radical.

The scene where Violet looks at herself naked before Marcus arrives is so specific and real. It’s this moment of a woman reclaiming her body as hers, not just as mother or widow, but as a sexual being with desires that matter. It’s the kind of scene that acknowledges women’s internalized ageism while showing a character working through it.

Contrast this with Benedict, who is theoretically the progressive one but can’t imagine a relationship structure that doesn’t preserve his privilege. Violet is the one who’s actually being brave. Benedict’s just pretending to be.

Francesca’s quest for the “pinnacle” (orgasm) is less successful. Mostly because it’s playing setup for future seasons rather than functioning as a story in its own right, we get it. Francesca can’t climax with her perfectly nice husband, John, because she’s eventually going to realize she’s queer and attracted to his cousin, Michaela. But right now, it’s just a lot of scenes of Francesca asking people to explain orgasms to her, which is… a choice.

Also, the Penelope/Queen Charlotte stuff about Lady Whistledown feels like the show checking in with fan-favorite characters without having much for them to do. Their wager about whether Benedict will marry is clearly set up for Part 2, but it’s also kind of low-stakes compared to everything else happening.

The servants we don’t see enough of.

The biggest frustration with Season 4 is that it gestures toward centering servants’ perspectives but doesn’t quite commit to it.

Yes, we get that opening tracking shot. We do meet Sophie’s friends at Penwood House—Alfie the footman and Irma the cook—who help her prepare for the ball. But these remain gestures. The servants are more visible than in previous seasons, but still fundamentally in service (pun intended) to the aristocratic plot. We don’t get subplots about their lives, relationships, or concerns that aren’t connected to the upstairs drama.

And something is telling us about which servants we see smiling. At Penwood House and Cavender House (bad employers), servants are exploited and miserable. At Bridgerton House (good employers), everyone seems content with their lot. This individualizes systemic critique. The problem isn’t the servant system, just bad masters.

Mrs. Crabtree, Benedict’s housekeeper at My Cottage, is the only servant who explicitly calls out the power dynamic. She scolds Benedict for flirting with Sophie, for leading her on when he has so much power over her. It’s a crucial moment of someone actually naming the problem. But then Mrs. Crabtree disappears from the narrative when they return to London. And no one at Bridgerton House performs the same corrective function.

The show wants credit for depicting servants’ labor and lives while still maintaining the fantasy that the Bridgertons are fundamentally good people whose privilege is benign. That’s just having it both ways.

A personal note for all you gentle readers.

This might seem like taking Bridgerton too seriously. In fact, it’s definitely that.

But here’s the thing. There are plenty of reasons to like Bridgerton! It’s beautifully made, well-acted, and occasionally genuinely moving. It doesn’t need to be perfect or perfectly progressive to enjoy it.

But enjoying something doesn’t mean we can’t examine it critically. That pointing out contradictions somehow ruins the fun. The show asks us to think about class and power. It opened with a tracking shot through servants’ quarters, for crying out loud. It invited this analysis.

And frankly, noticing the contradictions makes it more interesting, not less. Watching a show negotiate between its political ambitions and genre requirements in real time is fascinating. Seeing talented people try to thread an incredibly difficult needle—make a romance that’s both escapist fantasy and thoughtful social commentary—is worth paying attention to. Even when (especially when) it doesn’t quite work.

Season 4’s trying to do something pretty difficult. It’s trying to make Cinderella about workers’ rights while still being Cinderella. It’s trying to examine privilege while making the privileged person sympathetic. And it’s trying to take class seriously while delivering the happy ending the genre requires.

That’s an almost impossible task. The fact that it’s even attempting it deserves credit. Whether it succeeds is the question Part 2 has to answer.

Bridgerton Season 4 Part 2 streams on Netflix starting February 26.

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Images courtesy of Netflix.