Whatever your gripe is with Bridgerton – whether it's about the era-inaccurate costumes, themes, or casting – you can't deny that it's one of the most popular Netflix titles to date. The first part of Season 4, for example, opened to 39.7 million views in its first four days. The streaming giant claims that it was the most-watched show or movie on Netflix during the Jan. 27 to Feb. 1 week.
The most viewed season debut was Season 3 in 2024, with a record-breaking 45.1 million views. But Bridgerton is no stranger to records: its first season was the most-watched debut of an original series at the time of its release, and only Squid Game broke that record in 2021. Some chalk the success up to timing, as it was released on Christmas Day in 2020, after almost a year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It's not just viewers who enjoy the show. Critics agree that it's a pretty decent show, too. Its score on Rotten Tomatoes currently holds an impressive 82% average, and its spin-off, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, has a 94% average.
"If you're pernickety about how to address nobles, or the correct depth of a curtsy, you won't enjoy this much, but once you relax your grip on the historical data it becomes good fun," Suzi Feay of the Financial Times wrote.
The show prides itself on its color-blind casting. You have to admit, seeing people of color in positions of power during the Regency era is quite empowering, even if not historically accurate. Actress Kathryn Drysdale, who portrays dressmaker Genevieve Delacroix in the show, has explained how the production team behind Bridgerton prioritizes people seeing themselves on screen.
"I think that's how you truly connect to your audience and those stories," Drysdale said on the afternoon show. "I've had a lot of feedback from people saying, 'Thank goodness, it's meant the world to me to see people like me in these dramas.'" She even called the casting choices color-conscious casting instead of color-blind casting. "I'm very much playing a mixed race modiste … nobody's blind to the fact that I am the colour that I am in this story."
Calling it color-blind casting has its disadvantages. As the professor of the practice in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University, Maurice Emmanuel Parent explains, the audience is not blind. People do see the symbolism in a play where there is an all-white cast and only a Black person playing a villain.
Parent says that color-conscious casting choices and the subtle inclusions of their culture in a play or a movie can be subtle invitations for BIPOC performers to feel powerful. "We allowed the bodies to tell the stories and invited the actors to be their full selves in the language, to imagine themselves in these roles that weren't written for them," he says, when talking about his production of The Three Musketeers with a predominantly BIPOC cast.
A common criticism for the show is the period-inaccurate costumes. People online have called out how historically inaccurate the color palettes, fabrics, and sometimes even silhouettes are, saying they would make no sense in real Regency-era London. The costume designers have only one response to that criticism: the show is fiction, and they're not going for historical accuracy.
