3 Reasons Why Netflix’s Bridgerton Lacks Special Depth Compared to Other Historical Romances

Bridgerton, Popular Historical Romance Series

Netflix’s Bridgerton, a popular historical romance series, has been praised for its glossy smoothness and the use of multiracial casting practices. The show’s focus on the Regency period creates a feeling that the world is largely unanchored in time and space, making it pleasurable to watch. However, the new season has left viewers exhausted by the endless ballrooms and gowns, with no real poor, working-class, or middle-class characters. The source material, the Bridgerton novels by Julia Quinn, also lacks any real poor, working-class, or middle-class characters. This small escape from the ton that the Mondriches offered is gone; we are back on the edges of the ballroom, seeing who’s looking at who again! My feet are tired.

Classes and Characters of Season 3

Season 3 takes the first two seasons’ few actual working-class characters, the Mondriches, and makes their young son a baron through the death of some distant relative. They must reconcile themselves to upholding aristocratic propriety by eschewing work and concentrating instead on planning the best possible parties. This very limited class milieu is part of what makes reading historical romance novels, and consuming their televisual adaptations, pleasurable for some. However, not everyone does historical romance like this. A good counter example among literary historical romances is Longbourn, by Jo Baker, which turns Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice around and narrates it from the point of view of the servants in the Bennet household.

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Alice Coldbreath’s Victorian Prizefighters

This is not a Downton Abbey–style “upstairs/downstairs” tale, set in a mansion where the servants are also part of an elevated class by dint of their employment in a grand house. It is a story of overworked servants employed by a family living beyond their means. Longbourn is not a product strictly of the romance genre. Many other more traditionally structured and marketed historical romance novels also play with class. Alice Coldbreath’s Victorian Prizefighters series features working- and middle-class people who barely have any contact at all with lords and ladies.

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Cecilia Grant’s Regency Blackshear Family

Cecilia Grant’s Regency Blackshear Family series contains one barnburner of a story, with a heroine who’s a former “kept” woman who falls in love with a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo suffering from PTSD. Sarah MacLean sets many of her novels partially in the demimonde, and even Lisa Kleypas gives the family in her excellent Ravenels series a serious economic problem grounded in actual history: How can one be a lord at a time when tenant farming is no longer going to support an estate? The answer involves some standing around at functions, to be sure, but much more digging of irrigation ditches.

Women’s work is a frequent plot point; the heroine of one of these stories knows that her man’s for real when he protects her from his evil mother’s constant demands that she take over her daily chores. Three seasons in, what I miss in Netflix’s Bridgerton and its source material is texture: that sense of variety, in story, experience, and action. Without it, there’s a flatness to the world and all the glittering little figurines inhabiting it. Bridgerton is many things — successful, uneven, entertaining — but it is, critically, obedient to the requirements of particular romance tropes. In the first season, when Daphne married Simon, that was a “fake relationship.”