Bridgerton Review

It is exactly what it sets out to be, and there is no point criticising it for that. The production spends enormous money on wisteria, ballrooms, jewel coloured silk and a string quartet playing recent chart music, and the result is genuinely pleasurable to look at. The device of a scandal sheet narrated by Julie Andrews gives the whole thing a fairy tale distance that lets it ignore history when history would be inconvenient. Nicola Coughlan and Claudia Jessie are the most interesting people in the cast, playing young women who want something other than a husband, and the second season's slow burn between Jonathan Bailey and Simone Ashley is much better constructed than the first's. Two real problems.

The first season contains a sexual assault that the novel acknowledges and the adaptation stages without ever naming, which is a serious lapse. And there is almost no friction anywhere: fortunes are never really at risk, families never really fracture, and the misunderstandings dissolve on contact with a conversation.