TV's favorite couple is returning to the screen for season 3 of Bridgerton, supposedly more in love than ever before. When season 2 came out, everyone and their mom was fawning over Kanthony, the couple consisting of Kate Sharma and Anthony Bridgerton. They insisted the season was fantastic, and that the romance paralleled the iconic story of Pride & Prejudice.
They were wrong.
Dropping during the pandemic, Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton series on Netflix, based on the books by Julia Quinn, became instantly popular, hooking audiences with modern day romance tropes and spicy scenes against the glamorous backdrop of Victorian England. Unfortunately, this show, like many works of romance published lately, struggles to properly develop its romantic relationships past trope checklists.
I can only speak for season 2, as it's the only season I bothered to watch since viewers around the world promised it was so good and that it was much better than season 1. I had given season 1 a chance when it had come out because everyone had been talking about it, but I found it so boring I couldn't make it very far. I also didn't watch Queen Charlotte, though I've heard from fans of the show that this is the best done storyline as it follows the more emotional story of the Queen and her ill-fated King. And I definitely don't plan to watch season 3 after wasting my time on season 2.
The reason I stuck through season 2 when it came out was because I really wanted it to somehow surprise me. I'm a massive fan of the 2005 Pride & Prejudice film starring Keira Knightley and in my opinion, a romance story can't get any better than that. I expect a lot from the genre both on screen and on the page, but I find I'm often faced with terrible storytelling including but not limited to: the main girl choosing a terrible jerk, love triangles, convoluted plotlines existing only to draw out the story, miscommunication, and tropes with no development.
Season 2 of Bridgerton falls in that last category for me. Watching the show, it felt like a generic enemies to lovers checklist:
The instant dislike: Kate and Anthony meet. Kate overhears something and they decide to dislike each other.
She's not like other girls: Kate is the only girl on a hunting trip.
The accidental intimacy: Anthony freaks out over a bee which somehow ends in him grazing Kate's breast and creates tension between them. (Let's not even talk about how cringey this scene was to watch, and absolutely ludicrous in nature.)
The thing keeping them apart: Kate's sister is set to marry Anthony.
That thing is no longer a problem: Kate's sister finds out by seeing how Kate and Anthony looked at each other during the wedding and the wedding is cancelled.
Refusing to close the deal even though there's nothing in their way: Kate and Anthony do nothing to progress their relationship. (Even if they thought they wouldn't be accepted by the society, they still didn't get together in private.)
Finally getting together: In a ripoff of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy's iconic dance sequence, Kate and Anthony finally get together.
Actually never mind: They sleep together but then Kate changes her mind.
Actually, double never mind: They decide to get together officially.
I didn't even really leave stuff out because this is essentially the bulk of their interactions. There's no development between the things I listed. Writing a romance shouldn't be like A then B then C then D. It needs to flow, the characters need to grow separately and together, and the plot has to feel organic rather than drawn out. A major part of why Pride & Prejudice works so well is because both Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are complex and interesting people with rich internal lives. Meanwhile Kate and Anthony are entirely two dimensional with pretty much the exact same personality.
I genuinely don't understand why people think this is one of the best relationships to ever exist. Maybe people like them together at the end but there's no way y'all really think this was a well written romance. In a weird way, the relationship is both underdeveloped and also drawn out. Underdeveloped is what happens when there's nothing between the plot points, and drawn out is what happens when the plot points occur too quickly and therefore there needs to be more of them to fit the runtime.
In my opinion, one season of a TV show is way too long for a romance storyline. Maybe if it was a subplot it would be better developed. A feature film romance works, a short romance in a TV episode works, a background romance across multiple seasons of a TV show works if we're not only seeing them get together but also seeing what happens after. But an entire season? Even with the Featherington storyline, it still felt tedious to watch, augmented by the fact that no developments were being made.
This is why sometimes romance focused k-dramas can feel overly drawn out as well. The better ones populate the romances alongside other plotlines that take up a significant portion of the story. Like the show Romance Is A Bonus Book has 16 episodes, but the story is more about the main character finding herself and her new career after divorce and less about her developing relationship with the male lead. This makes it interesting to follow her journey but also keeps the romance portion at a tolerable level.
Part of me wonders if most fans of Bridgerton are simply accustomed to low quality romances so when they see something an inch from mediocre, they think it's the next coming of Jane Austen. These fans most likely have never seen Pride & Prejudice 2005 in their lives and are the type of people who get their book recommendations off Wattpad and BookTok. The tropification of romance books is a topic for another day, but it basically encourages this mindset within readers to judge books and other stories based on a checklist like the one I presented above.
They might come across a book about a woman being forced to marry a billionaire and judge it accordingly:
Is it enemies to lovers? Yes.
Is the female lead snarky? Yes.
Is the male lead super unemotional and arrogant and therefore hot? Yes.
Do they sleep together and is it depicted graphically? Yes.
Do they get together by the end? Yes.
Having met all these criteria, the reader now gives the book a 5/5 rating.
Now, I'm not saying that in theory there's not a book out there with this premise and these tropes that isn't bad. But tropes is how many people judge what they consume. Rather than how well the story is developed, all that really matters is if they get those critical scenes at some point throughout whatever they're reading or watching.
It's also possible that many people are watching the show because they like period pieces and there aren't many others readily available. I say readily available because no one's buying Britbox or other premium subscriptions just to find a show. Most people watch whatever their existing platforms can offer. Netflix, the most popular platform, is home only to Bridgerton, Downton Abbey, and maybe a couple other shows or movies set in that similar era of British history, and fewer yet that are romance focused. If there are more, then they do a good enough job of hiding and not promoting those because no one's finding them.
My mother, a fan of Pride & Prejudice since her days studying English literature in college, told me recently she'd started this series called Bridgerton out of boredom. She didn't really like what she was watching and fast forwarded through parts of it, and then she stopped watching altogether, but Netflix still counts the views. Maybe a lot of viewers of the show are like her or myself in that regard.
But it still doesn't explain why people are so gagged by the romances, especially Kanthony. The fact that throughout the entire season the only time I was gagged was not by the couple but by Penelope telling Eloise she's essentially a dumb spoiled brat is really a sign of how poorly the romance storyline was told.
I wonder if I should just let people enjoy things but then I remember I can count well told romance films and shows combined on one hand. I don't want to have to settle for Bridgerton and Kanthony just because the rest of the world is complacent when I could instead have the caliber of romance we got from Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.
But there are eight Bridgerton books and a rising number of low effort romance books circulating social media just ripe for adaptation. So unless someone steps in and gives us the romance stories we deserve, garbage will replace mediocrity as the new norm in this genre.