NYT: "Bridgerton" Needs More Hot Gay Toothless Hockey Star Action
Jane Austen plus interracial soft core porn seemed like the perfect idea in 2020, but in 2026, the romance audience demands more NHL slash fiction.
Northwestern Europe, perhaps starting in Provence 1000 years ago, more or less invented the culture that women around the world most like to imagine themselves living in, whether in ancien regime Paris or in Jane Austen’s Regency England.
But this remarkable culture was invented by whites, so it was racist. Still, women can’t get enough of Austen Era stuff, so the soap opera Bridgerton debuted in 2020 set in a Regency England where people of color had been awarded noble titles and landed estates for reasons.
From the New York Times opinion section:
Feb. 25, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Jayashree Kamblé
Dr. Kamblé is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, whose research focuses on romance novels and narratives.
I bet it does.
The fourth season of Shonda Rhimes’s “Bridgerton,” which concludes this week, crackles with romantic electricity between two lovers: Benedict, the second son of the wealthy Bridgerton family, and Sophie, his family’s maid. When Benedict, played by Luke Thompson, and Sophie, played by Yerin Ha, are onscreen together, the scenes thrum with their attraction. …
But then the spell breaks and the show moves on to another plot, or subplot, with other characters. And this is why “Bridgerton” will always be frustrating to me. Instead of a study of two characters’ evolving erotic connection, the show is a sprawling soap opera. …
Each of these detours is distracting, blocking the climb to the romantic pinnacle we otherwise could have achieved. It also gets in the way of the full consummation of the Shondaland adaptation’s more radical intentions. Along with being sexy entertainment, the show aspires to disrupt expectations about who is allowed to star in our romance fantasies. It set out to repaint the ballroom-wall-to-ballroom-wall whiteness common in historical romance and offer a modern, feminist approach to the genre. …
The show offered an in-universe narrative about racial integration — spurred by the interracial love of its king and queen — and scenes of working-class characters, women throwing punches and queer desire. Over time, a wider constellation of characters has been deployed to point quickly at colonialism, class mobility and other forms of sociopolitical marginalization.
The fourth season of “Bridgerton” has many of the same problems, but it must now compete in a romance landscape reshaped by “Heated Rivalry,” a show in which neither the orgasms nor the progressiveness come off as fake.
Paywall here.
