To me, Bridgeton is beginning to appear flat.

After three seasons, the popular Netflix series is still all about dresses and ballrooms.

As much of a confection as the previous two (or three, if you include the prequel, Queen Charlotte), the newest season of Bridgerton features fan-favorite spinster gossip columnist Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) finally getting together with her longtime crush Colin Bridgerton .

The action takes place in a London that is so green and smokeless that it’s hard to believe the drama takes place in the Regency era. The people are attractive, the clothing are breath-taking, the trees and vines are always neatly maintained and in blossom.

This smooth, glossy finish is exactly what we have become accustomed to from Bridgerton. This world feels a little bit to the side of history, largely unanchored in time and space, thanks to its much-discussed multiracial casting practices and a meagre (and, in my opinion, unconvincing) degree of world building explaining Black participation in the aristocracy.

To the show’s credit, this is part of what makes it so enjoyable to watch; other shows have attempted, albeit with differing degrees of success, to replicate this frothy-fun mood, such as Apple TV+’s The Buccaneers.

But this time, like the “off-the-shelf” Penelope, I admit to being worn out from standing at the edges of all these endless ballrooms, watching these opulently dressed rich people dance and exchange spoken glances after watching the batch of episodes that were released as Part 1 of this new season.

I’m dying for a different scene with different stakes after the fourth or so installment, which switches up the events at so-and-so’s luncheon or musicale. Lord help me, I missed that embarrassing flirting between Eloise Bridgerton and the young printer’s apprentice in the second season.

There are no true working-class, middle-class, or impoverished characters in this programme, just as there are no seasons other than spring in the Bridgerton-verse. Not even the attendants possess

Naturally, this is also the case with the original material, which are Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels. Seldom does anyone who isn’t a member of the nobility—or at the very least, a wealthy parvenu like Penelope or the nobility’s illegitimate child—get a chance to shine in the story.

Since the Bridgertons are the characters we care about, questions of impending deprivation are always confined to the outside of the story, remaining speculative and never posing a threat. This family is portrayed as being somewhat financially comfortable because of the meticulous estate management of their late father and their conscientious elder brother Anthony.

If people are unhappy, it’s only in their minds. Financial ruin is a constant threat to those who are not the Bridgertons of paper and screen, yet it never quite seems to materialise.

The main character of the second season, Kate Sharma, was raised by a “shopkeeper” father and must marry her sister off to a member of the nobility in order to provide financial support; the Feathering tons are constantly narrowly avoiding some sort of catastrophe. But wealth and comfort lie at the heart of the tale.

Even the only real working-class characters from the first two seasons, the Mondriches (Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi), are elevated to the nobility in Season 3 by means of the passing of a distant relative.

As they did in Season 2: The Mondriches are no longer a boxer and his wife, nor are they even proprietors of a gentleman’s club. Like everyone else, they are leisure patricians.

They have to make peace with maintaining aristocratic decorum by shunning labour and focusing on organising the greatest parties imaginable. This implies that the brief respite from the chaos provided by the Moriches is no longer available; we are once more observing who is staring at whom on the ballroom’s periphery! My feet are worn out.

Some people find pleasure in reading historical romance novels and watching their televised adaptations because of this extremely constrained class environment.

However, this isn’t how everyone approaches historical romance. A notable literary historical romance that serves as a counterexample is Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which retells Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet household’s servants, focusing on the passion between a housemaid and a footman.

This is not a “upstairs/downstairs” story in the vein of Downton Abbey; rather, it takes place in a mansion where the servants work in a great home and are therefore also members of an upper class.

It tells the tale of overworked maids who work for a family that cannot afford to live well. The servants dislike having to deal with the additional load of washing that guests bring and the late evenings spent waiting up when family members go out to balls.

They also have to quickly clear the cobwebs out of the guest rooms’ corners. They’re tired and sniping at each other all the time. The romance revolves around this tiredness; for example, the heroine falls in love with the hero because he does the everyday chore of starting the kitchen fire for her before she wakes up.

Longbourn is more than just a romantic fiction book. However, class is also a factor in a lot of other historical romance novels that are published and structured more conventionally. In her Victorian Prizefighters series, Alice Coldbreath depicts working- and middle-class individuals who have very little interaction with lords and ladies.

Women’s labour is a common plot device; in one of these stories, the heroine realises her guy is real when he shields her from his nasty mother’s persistent demands that she take on her daily responsibilities.

One of the barnburner tales in Cecilia Grant’s Regency Blackshear Family series is a heroine who was once “kept” and falls in love with a PTSD-stricken Waterloo warrior. In fact, Lisa Kleypas, who adores the aristocratic and wealthy, poses a historical-based, serious economic question to the family in her superb Ravenels series:

How can one be a lord when tenant farming is no longer able to sustain an estate? Sarah MacLean places a large number of her novels partly in the demimonde. The solution is to dig a lot more irrigation ditches in addition to spending some time standing around at functions.

I don’t only want viewers of Bridger ton who are looking for pure entertainment to be forced to eat their veggies in terms of historical accuracy or social awareness. It is not necessary for every show to portray everyone, and trying to do so would be futile.

But after three seasons, texture—that sense of variation in plot, experience, and action—is what I miss from both Netflix’s Bridger ton and its original material.

Without it, the globe and all the sparkling tiny figurines within it have a flat quality. I wish the Bridger tons and the people they fall in love with had bodies. I know, it seems strange to say this about a show that gained notoriety for its sexual content.

Is there anyone here who wouldn’t mind working up a sweat for once? I am aware of for certain that others are washing their clothes.