Club Benefits
For three seasons now, "Bridgerton" has traded on sumptuous fantasy — the bodice-ripping romance, the lavish ballroom dances, the progressive rewriting of English colonialism and even the perpetually in-bloom wisteria winding its way along the Bridgerton family residence. It’s altogether a dreamy bit of escapism, where love ultimately wins (after some drama-drumming act two misunderstandings, of course), the monarchy is occupied by nothing more than matchmaking, and all the men look like Jonathan Bailey.
And all of that luxurious aspiration is still certainly at play in the fourth installment of the Regency-era Netflix hit. "Bridgerton" season 4 premieres its first four episodes today (Jan. 29), and then sticks to its split-season model, with the final four eps to arrive on the streaming service nearly a month later on Feb. 26.
But in shifting its rose-tinted lens onto the relationship between the free-spirited nobleman Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) — a maid forced into servitude by her stepmother — “Bridgerton” more deeply delves into the upstairs-downstairs dynamic that has powered similar historical dramas like “Downton Abbey” and “The Gilded Age,” shining a well-earned spotlight on the hard-working (and meagerly paid) staff who make that fantasy a reality for the ritzy residents of the Ton. The beautiful bubble bursts, so to speak, and the series is stronger for it.
'Bridgerton' season 4 gets real about high society — finally
After some source material shuffling, our romantic lead for "Bridgerton" season 4 is the second-eldest Bridgerton brother, Benedict, who’s the most bohemian of the bunch, marked by his agreeable nature to, well, everything: women, men, sex, art and booze. He’s perfectly content to wade in what he calls “shallow waters,” away from the expectations of his nobility — that’s for his older bro Viscount Anthony (Bailey, sadly missing from Volume I), to be concerned about — and the social merry-go-round of the marriage market.
That's all much to the chagrin of his mother, Violet (Ruth Gemmell), who is especially taken with marrying off Benedict and his equally modern-minded sibling, Eloise (Claudia Jessie), during the current social season (all while sweetly navigating her own romantic connection with the hunky Lord Marcus Anderson, played by Daniel Francis).
Benedict seems happily committed to his non-committal rakishness — that is, until he catches sight of the Lady in Silver at his mother’s masquerade ball, a mysterious woman gazing in awe upon the glittering chandelier that dominates the room. Her identity is largely masked by a lacy headpiece, but the Bridgerton lad is instantly taken by her in a way heretofore unachieved by the other eligible ladies of the Ton (who bear “no true animation, no zest for life, no personality,” Benny bemoans in one scene).
A dance, several laughs and, yes, a stolen smooch are shared between the two before the clock strikes midnight, when the party guests are meant to remove their masks and reveal themselves. Naturally, the Lady in Silver takes off before Benedict can meet her face-to-face, and he’s left consumed by the mystifying memory of her.
Now, this is all sounding very textbook “Bridgerton” thus far, but here’s the cheeky twist: the reason that Lady in Silver charmingly doesn’t quite understand dance-card etiquette or know the proper choreography to the ball’s chamber arrangements of Third Eye Blind’s “Never Let You Go” is because she’s actually a lowly maid named Sophie Baek, the illegitimate daughter of an earl, whose stepmother Araminta (Katie Leung) harshly forced the girl into servitude upon her father’s death. With the affectionate help of two fellow Penwood House staffers (David Moorst’s Alfie and Fiona Marr’s Irma), Sophie was able to get secretly gussied up and sneak out of the residence to play Cinderella for one night and one night only at the Bridgerton ball.
Or so she thought, because now Benedict is desperately searching the whole of the Ton for the silver-masked ingénue who unexpectedly stole his heart. The Bridgerton does eventually come across Sophie again, but this time as her working-class self, unbeknownst to him that she and the Lady in Silver are one and the same. True identity aside, there’s still palpable chemistry there — albeit nowhere near as steamy as with the show’s prior couples, nor as warmly familiar as the connection between last season’s leads Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton, and also hampered by the fact that Thompson's best on-screen repartee remains with Claudia Jessie, who plays his sister — but it’s a spark cruelly snuffed out by the reality of their social rank.
It’s a smart pivot for a show that has heretofore played fantastically fast and loose with everything from racial integration to sexual freedom. We’ve gotten to dip a toe into class tensions over the past three seasons (the Featheringtons’ money issues, the Mondrichs’ rags-to-riches rise), but season 4 fully submerges viewers into that social and financial friction. (In one meta-moment from episode three, Golda Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte brushes off the idea that the royal residence keeps a household staff, to which her right-hand man Brimsley excellently quips: “We have 142 maids and manservants, Your Majesty.”)
In expanding into the behind-the-scenes of that aristocratic world, season four not only gives us a closer look at the lives and labor of the show’s many background servants — from the Bridgertons’ head housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (Geraldine Alexander) to Benedict’s flirty valet, Footman John (Oli Higginson) — but also assigns some of its most moving moments thus far to those very maids and manservants, such as a tearful plea from the aforementioned Brimsley (Hugh Sachs) to Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) on behalf of his beloved queen.
Previous chapters of the Netflix romance suffered from too many undercooked subplots that detracted and distracted from the core couple, but each of this season’s departures to the downstairs world only enhances the growing tensions between Sophie and Benedict. We’ll have to see whether the actors can parlay the intensity of those social pressures into a more believable, visceral passion in the season’s back-half — especially after Benedict’s rather ungentlemanly offer to the housemaid in Volume I’s final moments — but, for now, they’re getting by with a little help from their friends, and faithful staff.
"Bridgerton" season 4 part 1 is available to stream on Netflix beginning Thursday, January 29 at 3 a.m. ET / 12 a.m. PT
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