Can it really be true that teens, at least in America according to a UCLA study, would prefer to watch TV shows and movies about friendship rather than romance?
At that age, romantic ideals are supposed to be formed from not experience but from the pages and images of heroes and heroines declaring their undying love. It’s only later when you discover how unrealistic that is.
Perhaps that’s why the likes of Heated Rivalry and Bridgerton have proven to be such hits among not teens trying to visualise their future, but from those with a little mileage in their life.
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These screen fantasies of tenderness, connection and sexual chemistry allow for vicarious yearning from women – and men – whose realities consist of emotionally absent partners, gross dating apps or voluntary celibacy.
It’s like a little hit of something, a mostly harmless injection of optimism that the grand romances we’d pictured in our early teens can exist, at least in fiction. When it’s not real, it’s low commitment and low stakes, and there are no arguments over whose turn it is to take out the bins.
Bridgerton’s fourth season draws on even more of that tradition of the storybook romance, with its plotlines lifted straight from Charles Perrault’s Cinderella. There’s no greater wish fulfilment than that of the maid who marries the prince.
Yerin Ha as Sophie. Credit: Liam Daniel/Netflix
Cinderella has been the template of a great many romantic films and TV shows, from the direct adaptations to the likes of Pretty Woman. At the core of it is this idea that you could be anyone – as long as you’re beautiful, kind and good – and still have your happily ever after.
It relies on there being natural justice defeating social hierarchy and economic limitations because love conquers all, right? Right?!
This fourth season of Bridgerton comes from the third of Julia Quinn’s novels, An Offer from a Gentleman, and concerns the second brother, Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson).
While not as milquetoast as his younger sibling Colin (Luke Newton), the subject of the previous season, Benedict has spent the past three years as a generic playboy sauntering in and out of backroom parties.
His laissez-faire attitude and lack of urgency to take a wife has been a point of consternation for his mother Violet (Ruth Gemmell) and the Queen (Golda Rosheuvel), that is, until he has an encounter with a mysterious “Silver Lady” at the Bridgerton masked ball.
The woman in question is Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman who has since died, and who left her in the care of his then-wife Lady Araminta (Katie Leung), who took the extra money bequeathed by the will and put Sophie to work as a servant.
Araminta is, of course, the legendary evil stepmother, with two marriage-age daughters of her own, the shallow Rosamund (Michelle Mao) and the gentler Posy (Isabella Wei).
Katie Leung (centre) as the evil stepmother Lady Araminta. Credit: Liam Daniel/Netflix
Sophie had snuck into the ball with the help of the other downstairs staff, but rather than leaving behind a glass slipper, it’s a silver glove, which Benedict clutches onto as he seeks to find the only woman who has ever piqued his interest.
Thompson is fine as a dashing figure with his charming-enough smile, as if he knows something you don’t, and he’s a definite step-up from the previous season.
With the exception of Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony, the series has frequently struggled with its male leads. This will be blasphemous to some because Rege Jean-Page, the Duke in season one, is, undoubtedly, physically hot, but his rendering of Simon was utterly devoid of charisma.
The women of Bridgerton, though, have been these wonderful creatures full of verve and spark, and so it goes too for Ha’s Sophie.
Ha, an Australian actor who has been in local productions such as Bad Behaviour and Troppo as well as American shows including Halo and Dune: Prophecy, brings a quiet strength to Sophie.
She is a sweet and generous soul but brooks no bullsh-t. Gaslit by Araminta into believing that her father had left no provisions for her, Sophie has been, in a sense, browbeaten by the class strata of Regency England into accepting her “lot”.
Servants don’t get to wear pastels. Credit: Liam Daniel/Netflix
Bridgerton has never been that interested in exploring the elitist status quo within its world, other than to declare the eponymous family as “good” rich people. But it goes along, without any handwringing, that the division between the aristocracy and everyone else is how it should be.
The entire organising principle of the marriage market is to keep everything within these privileged families of Grosvenor Square and The Ton. That’s part of the fantasy the show is selling, so it is slightly awkward to venture below stairs.
Sophie may be staff but she is someone who was still born to at least one wealthy parent and has been schooled in history, languages and all those markers of privilege. Sophie is not quite like her co-workers.
Her inevitable “upward mobility” – the season has been split into two parts, with the back half to drop in late February – will be the exception, and one that is almost destined due to her parentage.
This is not a show that is interested in dismantling or even questioning the system.
Masked balls are a handy device for mysterious identities. Credit: Liam Daniel/Netflix
The other fantasy that Bridgerton is selling is that all of its lead characters – and therefore, the viewer who transposes themselves onto its heroes – are special. Because romance is supposed to make you feel special. Feel chosen.
Each year, whether it’s Penelope or Daphne, or Simon or Benedict, they’re not interested in the great throng of suitors. Women and men who are grouped together, might as well be nameless, as they call for tea or bat their eyelashes and giggle from the sidelines, who are not “worthy”.
Each rejected prospect is either silly or a dolt, and there’s something kind of judgmental about that positioning, but swoony and dreamy stories have always hinged on the idea that love is about being seen for your extraordinariness.
In that sense, despite its “radical” casting or its occasional horniness, Bridgerton actually reinforces conservative ideas of romance.
When it comes to being swept off our feet, even vicariously, we want it old-school.
