Review: Netflix’s Bridgerton, Season 1
When Bridgerton debuted on Netflix in December 2020, it arrived like a lavish scandal sheet tossed across the polished parquet of period drama—a Regency world painted in sugar and fire. Created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shonda Rhimes, Bridgerton Season 1 reimagines the romance novel as spectacle: lush, diverse, unapologetically sensual, and unashamed of its pleasures. The result is not a history lesson but a fantasy of desire, power, and reinvention that feels both decadent and distinctly modern.
Set in an alternate 1813 London where race and class hierarchy are rewritten, the show follows the debut season of Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), the eldest daughter of a sprawling, affectionate family. Her match with the brooding Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), begins as a sham and blooms into a tempest of real passion. Around them swirl a chorus of subplots—scheming Featheringtons, the mysterious Lady Whistledown, and endless promenades through a society obsessed with appearances.
It’s the combination of these worlds—the tightly corseted and the emotionally unbuttoned—that gives Bridgerton its charm. Van Dusen and Rhimes borrow the language of the costume drama (carriages, chandeliers, quadrilles) but translate it through the pacing of a Shondaland drama. The show pulses with color and rhythm; string-quartet covers of pop songs (Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande) replace minuets, and the camera lingers as much on sweat and skin as on lace and manners.
Regé-Jean Page is the breakout star, radiating charisma and wounded pride as Simon Basset, while Phoebe Dynevor’s Daphne grows from porcelain debutante to a woman discovering her own power. Their chemistry ignites the season’s middle stretch, turning Bridgerton from frothy escapism into something genuinely erotic. Yet beneath the fireworks, the show quietly explores the limitations placed on women—the ignorance surrounding sex, the transactional nature of marriage, the impossible balance between virtue and desire.
Visually, the series is a feast: powdered pastels, jewel tones, and candlelight refracted through every crystal goblet. Production designer Will Hughes-Jones and costume designer Ellen Mirojnick build a world so vivid it borders on surreal—an Austen novel rendered in technicolor. But the writing, too, deserves credit. Beneath the gloss, there’s humor, compassion, and an awareness of how performance shapes identity, whether on a ballroom floor or in a gossip column.
If there’s a flaw, it lies in Bridgerton’s tendency toward melodrama and repetition. The sexual politics, especially in its later episodes, sometimes stumble under the weight of soapy excess. Yet even at its most indulgent, the show’s sincerity saves it. It believes in romance—not as submission but as self-knowledge—and that belief, more than any corset or candle, keeps it alight.
Bridgerton Season 1 is not Jane Austen; it’s Jane Austen rewritten by a modern dreamer who traded irony for heat and moral restraint for emotional honesty. And in its shimmering blend of fantasy, inclusivity, and heart, it created a new language for the period drama—one where the ton’s whispers sound suspiciously like our own.
