#Bridgerton season 2 series#

The connection between Anthony and Kate is immediate and obvious, from their mysterious woodland meet-cute turned flirtatious horserace, to their constant smoldering stares across rooms at one another. And the season is at its most interesting when it’s exploring the complex relationships between and among the Sheffield women, as well as the history their family has with various other members of the ton.

#Bridgerton season 2 series#

The decision to racebend the formerly white family of Anthony’s love interest into one of Indian descent is another refreshing and admirable move by a series that has worked hard to diversify the world of the Regency drama. In the first of what are multiple significant changes from the original novel, Bridgerton reinvents the original Sheffields as the Sharmas, now wards of Lady Danbury for the social season who have arrived in town in an attempt to find a husband for Edwina.

And Bailey certainly has the whole long-suffering, painful brooding thing down. His behavior doesn’t become less odious in places, but it does become a bit more understandable. This is, surprisingly, not as difficult as one might have originally expected, thanks to some judiciously placed flashbacks that explore several key formative moments in his youth. Since Anthony was a fairly major character last season-and kind of a huge jerk to several people, including his sister and her eventual husband-the show has to put in some work to rehabilitate his prospects as a romantic lead. To be fair, Bridgerton Season 2 has set itself a more difficult task from the start than its predecessor faced.

His quest introduces him to two sisters, Kate (Simone Ashley) and Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), who have recently arrived in London from Bombay with their mother, who has a past of her own with the ton. Unlike the series’ first outing, which followed the romance between eldest Bridgerton daughter Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) and the handsome Simon (Rege-Jean Page), Duke of Hastings, Season 2 switches gears to focus on her elder brother Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), who has determined that he must, at last, find himself a wife. The end result is something that is, on all accounts, honestly mostly fine, but that is ultimately tarnished by the memory of how good what came before it was. But book fans likely will resent many of the changes from Julia Quinn’s novel The Viscount Who Loved Me and non-book readers may struggle to believe in the depth of the story’s central relationship. There are colorful costumes, charming characters, plentiful scandals, and even a super cute corgi named Newton. The thing is: Bridgerton Season 2 is still really enjoyable television and there’s a lot to like here. But it’s still so darn disappointing that it doesn’t. So maybe there was never going to be a way that Bridgerton Season 2 could recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the series’ initial outing. The series’ success was so great that it helped push the entire genre in a more modern direction in terms of diversity and representation, all while embracing more open attitudes towards sex and female pleasure. The first season of the Regency romance was one of the streamer’s biggest hits, exploding into the pop culture zeitgeist like a sexy, candy-colored bomb. The stakes are naturally even higher when we’re talking about a show like Netflix’s Bridgerton. Practically as soon as a hit emerges, the immediate next question is: can that success be repeated? Can a show that’s had an incredibly successful, popular first season possibly recreate the same magic in its second? And that seems to go double in the world of entertainment. Everyone knows that lightning almost never strikes twice.