'Bridgerton' Season 3's First Half is Everything... With One Big But

After two seasons and a successful spinoff, we know what to expect and enjoy from Bridgerton: marriage plots and romance tropes galore, delicious drama among second- and third-tier characters, contemporary Top 40 songs re-arranged to suit Regency period country dances, juicy gossip collected and distributed by Lady Whistledown, varying degrees and quantities of on-screen sex, lush costume and set design, and even more gossip. Like any Shondaland series worth its salt, Bridgerton is committed to its aesthetic and reliable in delivering on the themes and concerns that drive its characters.

What it is not is a series that can successfully be split in half, with the four episodes of Season 3’s first half arriving on May 16 and the remaining four landing a whole month later, on June 13. Given the permanently anxious state of streaming—and, one imagines, the viewership success of the most recent season of Stranger Things and The Crown’s final season—it’s not hard to understand why Netflix is repeating the strategy. It’s just, as Lady Whistledown might say, deeply vexing.

When last we saw Bridgerton, Anthony, Viscount Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) was marrying the enemy-to-love-of-his-life, the former Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley), and Lord Anthony’s sister Eloise (Claudia Jessie) was experiencing a hideously nasty and heartbreaking best friend breakup with Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan), who she discovered is the ton’s often-scathing gossip purveyor in chief, Lady Whistledown. As Season 3 opens, several months have passed. Anthony and Kate are back from their honeymoon (geographically speaking, anyway), and everyone else in the ton is returning to town for the debutante season and marriage mart.