Nailed, by Bridgerton

Shut up and take your shirt off, Colin

In the first week my husband was away, the kids and I watched Clarkson’s Farm.

In the second week, we finished Clarkson’s Farm and they went back to watching Japanese animated series enthusiastically overdubbed in English, and I went back to reading Restless Legs Syndrome: relief and hope for sleepless victims of a hidden epidemic (let me save you the trouble of reading it by summarizing and telling you that your legs aren’t actually the problem, but your brain, and there isn’t exactly a cure, but an eccentric mix of remedies to make your bedside table look like a pharmacy, and if you’re all out of options, why not try compression socks).

In the third week, fed up with the repetitive boredom of the evenings, I started the just-released season of Bridgerton.

The Bridgertons have just seen the script for Season 4

Gentle reader, I binged it. Over two nights, admittedly; but I crammed all four episodes, in bed, on my phone, and not even ironically. Tie me up in ribbons and call me Lady Whistledown, because I was fully into it. I even thought about it when I did the dishes and usually, when I do the dishes, I think about nothing at all.

I certainly began with a lofty attitude. I didn’t expect to last more than twenty minutes because even though I’d somehow watched the previous two seasons, I hadn’t missed the show while it had been gone. In fact, the idea of sitting through another round of this stylized, candy-coloured Regency romance, with a multiracial cast and a production budget the size of a small sovereign country - so revolutionary in TV terms only three years ago - seemed boring, because by now I was probably perimenopausal, and way less inclined to be charmed.

I stepped into the ring, then, a little too cocksure. But the genius of Bridgerton is that you always wind up punch-drunk afterwards, as if you weren’t expecting to be smacked around so relentlessly by such a weedy opponent. And trust me, in season three, the blows keep raining down.

Turns out I was one of 45 million who smashed it back this week. It’s so nice, in streaming terms, to be merely a heifer in the herd, because usually I’m watching something nobody else can stand or only a few can handle (has anyone else seen Billy & Molly, about a lonely man’s friendship with an otter in the Shetland Islands? Or all eight seasons of The Golden Girls, as I did last winter? The prosecution rests, Your Honour).

Billy & Molly on Disney+. His yellow gummies just killed me dead.

Before Netflix revealed its record-breaking viewing figures this week, probably to silence the sniping, the serious broadsheet critics gave Bridgerton a good kicking. I’ve been a critic, at times, and a negative review is a heck of a lot more fun to produce than a glowing one. But instead of complaining about the acting (overwrought, let’s be honest) and or the script (too few jokes), they were cross with Bridgerton for repeating itself.

Not another pair of lovers who don’t realise they’d be perfect together! Not another succession of longing looks across a ballroom floor! Not more ruffly frocks, extravagant wigs, and pop songs played by chamber musicians! They even criticised the sex, which is Bridgerton’s spicy hallmark, and is almost entirely choreographed for the straight female gaze. How can this become old hat within three seasons? Nobody else is doing it.

“The dialogue, the gossip, the ballroom dances to Billie Eilish songs: it’s all there, just the same as it ever was. The writers seem to have given up.”

A two-star review from The Telegraph

Criticising Bridgerton for doing its job - adapting a best-selling series of historical romance novels into sexy TV - is like bagging Lord of the Rings for too many fight scenes. The point of the romance genre, and Regency romance as a sub-genre, is to deliver to the reader ultimate satisfaction, within the rigours of the form. The promise is made to the reader, and the promise is always kept. Romance novels are one of the few things a reader can count on every time, and why its varied and wide readership is so loyal, over generations.

Bridgerton, too briefly by the looks, paid attention to this subculture of millions of readers and legitimised their enjoyment by being a jaw-dropping, unexpected commercial success. Suddenly everyone wanted to interview the Bridgerton novelist Julia Quinn, until then famous only to the readers who bought her novels in American supermarkets.

I interviewed her, too, over Zoom. She was still spinning, telling me it had all been serendipity. The juggernaut television producer Shonda Rhimes happened to have picked up a 20-year-old Bridgerton novel at a holiday house one summer. She read it, found it hooky and clever, and saw the possibilities for television. Further, there were eight novels - one for each young Bridgerton, presumably all of whom would have to be married off after their own tumultuous arc. This must have appealed to Shonda Rhimes’ businesslike mind. She prefers a multi-season keeper, having invented Grey’s Anatomy - a medical drama still in production, that premiered when George Bush was President.

I asked Quinn how many millions she’d raked in since the Netflix adaptation. She said, diplomatically, “It’s been a marquee year in this household.” She held it together for the question, but she was quivering with happiness - not just for her own success, but for what it meant for other romance writers, who might finally enjoy a turn about the room.

While I was washing the dishes, I wondered why season three is still such wonderfully addictive TV, especially when I didn’t invest a whole lot of emotion in the couple at the centre of it all. We’re now up to the third Bridgerton, Colin (handily, there is a Bridgerton for each of the first eight letters of the alphabet). Stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens in episode four, although I’m not sure it’s possible to spoil Bridgerton, exactly.

Colin, I have to tell you, is a bit of a drip. He’s just come back from his OE to Europe and everyone in Bridgerton is doubletaking because he’s suddenly sexy, sophisticated, and the most eligible bachelor around. Personally, I don’t see much difference between pre-OE Colin and post-OE Colin. He looks the same and has the same blankness of personality. Maybe he’s got better hair (it’s upswept and magnificent), but the only major progression is that this version of Colin gets more lines.

Not many people can pull off a tapestry waistcoat. Bravo, Colin

It doesn’t matter! Colin’s appeal doesn’t matter because the architecture of Bridgerton does all the work for you. For one thing, he takes off his shirt for the first time and you’re like, OK, I get it now. The show slogs towards the inevitable first sex scene, the first breaking of manufactured tension between this season’s feature couple: Colin (Luke Newton) and Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) - Bridgerton’s eternal wallflower, less conventionally attractive than everybody else but still luminous - who, in the fourth episode, finally glom onto each other for some steamy heavy-petting.

It happens in a carriage, which is a Regency version of the back seat of a Holden. What I loved about the scene is that Colin is decidedly out of his depth. When he finally touches Penelope’s heaving breast, he is outclassed. His hand can’t manage it, because Penelope is the series’ only real woman, sized more than ten or twelve, and the costume department has really hiked her bosom into every shot. Her breasts are the third and fourth character in this relationship, but Colin can’t get his stupid twenty-something hand around even one of them. Somewhere among the heaving of Penelope’s chest and the jiggling of the carriage, you see his outspread fingers and his dumbo Bridgerton signet ring holding on for dear life. It’s laughable. It’s cute. It’s sexy. It’s ridiculous. It was over too soon, because the carriage pulls up outside his house. I wanted more.

So, you’re rooting for Colin and Penelope, while actually not giving a fig about Colin and Penelope. This is surely brilliant television. It’s narcotic enough that you want more, even though the love match isn’t something you’re basically interested in. I’ve decided that Bridgerton pulls me in for four other reasons.

The first is the baked goods. Forget the human cast - the foodstuffs are the hardest working element of this show, and I’m here for this. The first two series leaned hard into jellies and desserts - tables groaning with dainties, and champagne towers, to evoke decadence and abundance. This season, Penelope is checking out the sweets in a bakery tent while Colin pesters her with questions. It’s dawning on him that he fancies her, but she’s more interested in licking the icing off a cupcake. A curvy woman choosing dessert over a man, and eating it in front of him, to me, is a revolutionary act, in a culture where women aren’t supposed to have an appetite and are supposed to keep themselves thin, for men. Colin fixates on Penelope’s mouth - shining, shall we say, from all the butter - and there you have it. Give the props guy an Emmy.

Second, the interiors. When you reach a certain point in life, you become distracted, even in sex scenes, by the curtains, or the Queen Anne sideboard. Bridgerton is filmed in a succession of stunning mansions and country homes and they could just film the sets, beautifully lit and styled, with no action at all, and I’d watch it.

Forget Penelope; check out the pom-poms on those curtains

Third, the wigs. This is the running gag of Bridgerton. Everybody is in a wig, except possibly Colin; and as I’ve established, nobody cares about Colin. Queen Charlotte’s wigs get sillier every five minutes, and I have to tell you, in the third season it’s worth it simply for her scenes, and to imagine how much coke the production team must have snorted in the toilets. Stick around for the white wig featuring a tiny nest in the middle, within which is a painted backdrop and tiny revolving swans. The attention to detail, for only a few seconds of television, is beautiful and pointless and heartwarming.

Finally, the women. In Bridgerton, have you noticed? There are no significant male characters over forty. They’re dead. All dead. Or in the case of the King, mad, and off-camera. And of the three women with the most power - Violet Bridgerton, engineering her children’s matches, Lady Danbury, controlling the Queen, and the Queen, presiding over the social lives of the cast - all are over fifty, and seem like they’d be good fun in real life. They sparkle.

Ultimately, this is what I want from life, if not TV. Not Colin, but the wit and wisdom to control my destiny and the general respect of society while I do it. And of course, it’s a fantasy, a confection, a cupcake. A wig full of birds. Footmen and ladies’ maids. A carriage lined with silk. Not having to do the dishes, ever. And for somebody to make me a promise, and for that promise always to be kept.

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All these Bridgerton publicity stills are by Liam Daniel/Netflix. By all means, let’s rip off our undergarments, but not the photography.

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