‘The Bridgertons’: Why the second season is better than the first

It seems that the Duke of Hastings licking a spoon was not the only thing that ‘The Bridgertons’ had to offer, one of the most addictive series on Netflix. In its second season, the Netflix series shows that it can perfectly survive without the great successes of its first season and with new relationships, deeper themes, rounder characters and many more versions of hits pop (from ‘Material Girl’ to ‘Wrecking Ball’) to the rhythm of violins. The result is a joy for fans of period romance that compensates for its reduction in sexual content with more touches of comedy and emotional resonance.

Based on ‘The Viscount Who Loved Me’, the second book in Julia Quinn’s literary saga (although we already know that the differences between the series and the ‘The Bridgertons’ books are many), the new episodes put Anthony Bridgerton, the eldest son of the family, at the center of the action. The last time we saw him, he was wounded by a torrid romance that did not come to fruition and that made him decide that he was going to conform to what was expected of him: fulfill family obligations as patriarch of the house and find a suitable wife. to those needs. And love? Anthony wants nothing to do with him. Fortunately, it is not something that is entirely in his hands, as he will show the arrival of two new young women in London from India, the Sharma sisters. The youngest, Edwina (Charithra Chandran), has been raised to become the diamond of the season and the perfect wife, while the eldest, Kate (Simone Ashley), has made it her sole responsibility to help her find happiness even at the cost of of your own.

This is how the main pieces are placed on the board for this second season, in which ‘The Bridgertons’ aspire to consolidate their legion of fans on Netflix and continue capturing them with the stories not only of Anthony, Kate and Edwina, but also of the rest of the family that continues to build its stories in the background waiting for its moment to shine. At the moment, what they offer us is more than promising, in what is still one of the best Netflix series to watch as a couple. These are our reasons.

Less sex, but more chemistry

There may not be as many sex scenes in this season, but there’s a fair amount of intense staring, excruciating sexual tension, and sizzling chemistry between the leads.. “The hot moments are just as sexy and outrageous as the ones in the first season, in terms of the longing glances through the rooms and the fingers reaching out and brushing… I think all of that adds to the sexual tension that you feel this season and you just watch it grow from scene to scene, episode to episode,” showrunner Chris Van Dusen explained in an interview with DigitalSpy.

And we couldn’t agree more: in the new episodes, the most important thing is the construction of an apparently impossible longing in which not only love or passion matters, but also duty, fear and trauma. Where the Duke of Hastings caused sticky situations with Daphne in the first season because of a strange and misguided idea of ​​family revenge, Viscount Bridgerton makes his decisions (in most cases, also questionable) driven by fear of loss, terrified by the idea of ​​loving someone so intensely that the possibility of losing that person was intolerable. Perhaps because of Jonathan Bailey’s remarkable performance, perhaps because his love story does use the entire eight episodes of the season before getting married, or perhaps because his feelings feel more human and less constructed to convolute a fiction, Anthony Bridgerton’s season is fabulous.

A heroine up to the task

Jane Austen’s great influence on ‘The Bridgertons’ was evident from the first moment, bridging the gap with her racier scenes that would never have had a place in the British writer’s novels. In the second season of the series this is truer than ever, and it is thanks to its great female lead: Kate Sharma. The character played by Simone Ashley is a perfect heroine Austeniana stubborn, intelligent and combative woman who could well be Elizabeth Bennet’s alter ego from ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

While in the first season Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) was the naivepractically an adolescent discovering herself and experiencing a sexual awakening after a too puritanical upbringing, Kate Sharma is another kind of heroine. She is 26 years old, she is a woman who has accepted that romance is far from her (not so much because of age, but because of social position and family responsibilities), she yearns for the independence that money offers and she hates the limits that the society of the time insists on imposing on her, whether it’s when it comes to joining the men’s hunting parties or going out alone to ride a horse first thing in the morning.

All in all, she’s an amazing leading lady for a season in which so many other women have asserted their autonomy and power: her sister Edwina will learn that she must get to know herself better regardless of what others expect of her, Eloise BridgertonClaudia Jessie will find political feminism to make sense of her worldview, Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) will understand that she loves having become a businesswoman after the name of Lady Whistledown, her mother Lady FeatheringtonPolly Walker She has shown herself to be an absolute lioness to protect and ensure the safety of her daughters above anything else…

beyond romance

We came to ‘The Bridgertons’ for love, sex and romance, but we stayed because the characters move forward, learn and present new problems. It is a pity that the Duke of Hastings left before being able to see how his character evolved, and at the same time it has prevented Daphne from being able to continue being an interesting character, marked now by the absence of a husband who we understand is very busy as to stop by Aubrey Hall to play pall Mall. Or what is the same: the actor Regé Jean-Page is too busy with his new film adventures to be a mere secondary in the series that has made him famous.

The characters, we said, are the heart of the series. In these new episodes we will see the return of Colin BridgertonLuke Newton, who continues to lick the wounds of his romance with Marina, which he has not yet fully overcome despite having traveled around the world. We will also find Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh)who continues to pull the strings of London society and keeps Her Majesty on a short leash Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), who remains obsessed with unmasking another monarch, the Gossipy Queen, and using her power to her advantage. Be careful, there will be a spin-off of Queen Charlotte from ‘The Bridgertons’ and we already know the first details. In this new season there is also Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), who must be followed closely because he will be the protagonist of the third season. In this season we see how she deals with her dreams of becoming an artist, weighed down by her position of social and economic privilege despite the fact that her talent, it seems, speaks for itself.

To Benedict, Anthony, Kate, Eloise and company, the big theme of this season is the sense of duty and how it collides with personal dreams and aspirations. There we will find them battling, internally and externally, in some episodes where we will also delve more into the shared history of the Bridgerton family through flashbacks and we will expand the borders of the great halls of the city center to discover other realities and circumstances. In summary, The second season of ‘The Bridgertons’ continues to open new paths to enlarge a universe that, we have no doubt, will continue to arouse passions in the Netflix catalog.