HOW “BRIDGERTON” SEASON 4 SEAMLESSLY SHAKES UP MAYFAIR'S STATUS QUO

Bridgerton’s fourth season opens by telling us exactly what kind of story we're about to watch. Rather than beginning with the titular family, the premiere centers the people who serve them. For the first time, the servant class—long relegated to the narrative and visual background—moves front and center.

Upstairs, maids dust, make beds, assemble flowers, and carry trays. Downstairs, cooks dice vegetables, stuff Cornish hens, tend massive ovens, and stoke fires, pausing whenever a bell rings to see who's summoned them. The camera cuts between these workers with an accumulating effect, making it clear just how many bodies and how much labor are required to keep the Bridgertons’ lives painless and pleasant. It’s an unusual—and pointed—way to open a Regency romance best known for swooning and gossip (...and f*cking). Bridgerton—which has largely ignored telling stories about race—centers this season's storyline on class.

And Season 4 rises to the occasion like scone dough.

SPOILERS FOR "BRIDGERTON" SEASON 4 FROM THIS POINT

This Social Season Might Look a Little Different.

Until now, Bridgerton’s domestic staff have functioned largely as comic relief, there to gently puncture the excesses of high society. The Queen’s right-hand man, Brimsley, is a devoted gossip; Mrs. Varley, the Featheringtons’ long-suffering housekeeper, is valiantly patient. But because Bridgerton is a romance first, the world around its love stories has been kept relatively frictionless. (The show needs that space for maximal lust and longing.) That’s what sets apart from other upstairs-downstairs dramas like Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age, which weave in political and social conflicts alongside romance. Bridgerton has preferred nuptials, making it all the more surprising—and satisfying—that season four’s turn toward workers’ rights feels deliberate and complex, thanks in large part to the introduction of people’s champion Sophie Baek (played by a very captivating Yerin Ha).

Second son Benedict (played by abs-with-a-face Luke Thompson) may be this season’s designated romantic Bridgerton, but Sophie—a lord’s illegitimate daughter forced into servitude by her evil stepmother—is uniquely positioned to bridge the series’ two classes. And she steals the show.

Benedict’s biggest contribution to this Cinderella story, in fact, may be his mistaken belief that the Lady in Silver he meets at the season-opening masquerade is a fellow aristocrat. As viewers quickly learn (and he doesn’t), she’s Sophie, a maid who briefly escapes years of drudgery at Penwood House by passing as a debutante for one night, an act whose consequences ripple through the ton. When Lady Penwood (played by Katie Leung) fires Sophie and replaces her with four maids from other Mayfair households—an overcorrection that reveals just how much skilled labor Sophie had been doing alone—her inflated wages ignite the so-called “maid wars,” giving Bridgerton its clearest look yet at the upstairs-downstairs divide.

The series’ handling of this new thematic interest is both visual and narrative. Scenes are now staged, blocked, and shot to bring the domestic staff into greater focus.

After the Bridgertons’ masquerade ball where Benedict and Sophie meet, the camera lingers not on Eloise and her mother Violet as they discuss the former’s decision to be a spinster but on the maids cleaning up the leftover litter. As the ball’s last guests shuffle out, servants in matching uniforms do their chores in the foreground, sharing the same frame as their economic “betters.” Later in the season, after the Bridgerton sons playfully throw shaving foam at each other, a maid is shown scrubbing the floor, the furniture, and the walls—their fun now, her mess later.

Every time the Bridgertons plop down on their loveseats to eat petit fours and complain and commiserate with each other, we now think more about who makes those pastries and dusts that furniture. When Benedict admits he never carries keys to his country cottage (that's really a mansion), we think about the elderly Crabtree couple, tending to a house and grounds with no knowledge of when this impetuous little lord might stop by.

Throughout the first four episodes, Bridgerton incorporates who the servants are, and how they talk to each other about their work, to complicate our read on this as a fantasy world. And we start to ask: Who's it a fantasy for?

By sprinkling in little moments of punching-up, Bridgerton allows its servant cast to name that imbalance—and to resent it. Their frustrations aren’t framed as petulance, nor are they smoothed over with gratitude for employment. The Bridgertons’ footman John says of that ball, “Thrilling for them, chaos for us.” Lady Penwood’s footman Alfie sighs in relief when his taxing employer finally leaves for the evening. Mrs. Varley tries to negotiate for a raise after 20 years of service in the Featherington house only to get shot down. (Kudos to this series for always finding new ways to make Portia terrible.) And when Mrs. Varley resigns for a new position with Lady Penwood, she joins a whole swell of other servants who leave their placements for promises of better pay. Even Lady Danbury (played by Adjoa Andoh), the queen’s closest companion and former lady in waiting, chafes when she realizes that her bond with the monarch is more a relationship between a powerless employee and a toxic employer than one shared by two companions.

If one member of a relationship has to jump whenever the other calls, turns out, that’s not equality.

Desire is Not the Problem.

In case viewers don’t grasp why Bridgerton is spending so much time with its workers, the series gets meta with it by having Lady Whistledown write about the maid wars and the shortage of skilled workers in Mayfair. And Lady Danbury explains to the queen that workplace issues are the most enduring, and useful, gossip. How people treat one another—whether they’re fair, moral, and understanding to those whose labor they’re benefiting from—matters because it clues us into their broader behaviors and attitudes. And that dynamic charts onto Sophie and Benedict, too.

In the first half of the season, Benedict doesn’t find out that the Lady in Silver is secretly Sophie, but he does find himself developing feelings for Sophie as she actually is: a thoughtful, opinionated, hardworking, resourceful woman who's as comfortable nursing Benedict back to health as she is pointing out his ridiculous perspective on people who have to work for a living.

Even if Bridgerton has written itself a nice little loophole by making Sophie secretly a lord’s daughter, we never once see her waver in her commitment to championing her peers and colleagues. She just does it, and that self-assurance complements Bridgerton’s elevation of their concerns.

This dedication appears in Sophie and Benedict’s second meet-cute, when the two cross paths at a country house where Benedict is attending a party and where Sophie is now working. When they interact this time, it’s not at a glittering ball but during an attempted rape by a group of four partygoers pressuring a maid to “unbend a little.” When Sophie arrives on the scene, she orders the maid to flee and takes a stand against the men herself before Benedict gets involved. He white-knights well enough, but at the end of the altercation, Benedict still has all his status and wealth and Sophie is out of a job. That’s the class gap in one efficient, effective scene.

From that point on, Bridgerton slides into its own established tropes of having one of the Bridgerton boys’ love interests basically teach him everything he doesn’t know about the world. She points out Benedict’s lack of awareness about how few choices employees have; she voices her gratitude for the efforts of her co-workers, especially whenever they lay out a bountiful meal; she volunteers to help with other household tasks so no one person is taken advantage of. Even how some other servants treat her, like Mrs. Crabtree’s worry that Sophie will forget her “place” and get taken advantage of by Benedict, illuminates another aspect of this imbalanced society and how incongruously internalized that inequality can become within the people who actually suffer because of it.

That’s what makes Sophie’s refusal to accept a role as Benedict’s mistress at the end of part one so satisfying: Sophie knows she deserves to be more than a kept woman and recognizes that Benedict’s proposal is because he sees her as beneath her. He may have fallen for her, but he hasn’t yet fallen hard enough to marry her and break the customs of his class. (Yet.)

You Have Taken Possession of Me.

Like every great Bridgerton couple before them, Season 4 leads Benedict Bridgerton and his now-wife, Sophie Bridgerton to their happy ending. The wedded duo closes out Episode 8 by sealing their marriage with true love’s kiss during a surprise mid-credits wedding at My Cottage, the country estate where their relationship first began to flourish.

But unlike the Mayfair pairs who came before them, Benedict and Sophie had to overcome barriers of class, threatened prison time, secret identities, shoe clips of suspect origin, Lord Penwood’s secret will, and one scheming stepmother to secure their happily ever after. And this is Bridgerton at its most romantic.

As far as various takes on the Cinderella story go, Bridgerton Season 4 isn’t without its flaws. But as a mainstay of TV’s current romance genre, the show thankfully rekindles its flame with a grounded, forward thinking take on the fairytale.