An Anticlimactic Finish

Bridgerton's latest season has a fatally underdeveloped leading man but is still a ton of fun.

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

BRIDGERTON SEASON THREE. NETFLIX.

THREE SEASONS INTO its run, Bridgerton has fallen into a pattern: great at foreplay, iffy on the climax. No one signs up for a romance with the prospect of an underbaked conclusion, and it's frustrating when the momentum and groundwork of a slowly built relationship culminate in a finale that's just... fine. Still, Bridgerton's third season, with its expansion of bubbly minor characters and ample time spent on the other Bridgerton siblings, reduces the pressure on this underperforming high p point, and there's enough fun and anticipation in everything around the central couple that it almost doesn't matter that the apotheosis of the Colin-Penelope relationship (Polin) is more of a gentle plateau.

This installment of Bridgerton, like the first two, is a delightful romp with towering heaps of confectionary-sweet silliness, an overlay of Barbie feminism, and the occasional baffling structural flaw. Every season of Bridgerton has some amount of imperfection, but each is imperfect in its own way: Season one, sexy and unrestrained, saw a mess of racial politics and reproductive anxiety coursing beneath the show's fantasy of a post-racial Regency period. Season two, which included a somewhat more careful approach to the racial aspects of this universe, got pushback for not having enough sex and failing to adequately navigate the emotional ins and outs of its sisterly love triangle. In both cases, the season started from a promising premise, then failed to navigate the complexities of its emotional stakes in the back half.