With That Action-Packed Finale, Bridgerton Enters a Bold New Era, Says Showrunner Jess Brownell

With the cottage-side conclusion of Sophie and Benedict’s love story and tease of a new Lady Whistledown, Bridgerton season four comes to an action-packed close. Romance between restless second son Benedict (Luke Thompson) and Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), the illegitimate daughter of an earl who comes to work as a maid for the Bridgerton family, bucked Regency-era societal conventions.

This season served as a major turning point for the series, says showrunner Jess Brownell, who in season three took the helm of the Shonda Rhimes–produced Netflix hit based on Julia Quinn’s novels. With only two more adult Bridgerton children left to marry off, she’s turning her gaze beyond the show’s signature ballrooms. “Both Eloise and Francesca’s stories leave the marriage mart. We’re often outside of London,” Brownell tells Vanity Fair before the drop of Bridgerton season four, part two. “Francesca’s is a queer story, and Eloise is a very progressive person—her story actually starts with the marriage, rather than ending with the marriage.”

Of course, the identity of next season’s leading lady can’t be revealed just yet. But Brownell promises: “Either way we go, these are stories that are very much going to shake up the formula that we’ve seen from the first four seasons of Bridgerton.”

Jess Brownell: Seeing the response to Benedict’s faux pas, asking Sophie to be his mistress. This was a giant mistake really based on his greatest character flaw, which is his lack of conviction or bravery when it comes to committing to something that requires Benedict stepping out of society. It really makes sense from a story perspective, but I forget that everyone doesn’t know the books. But just because it was really common for people in the 1800s to take mistresses of another class doesn’t make it morally acceptable, and we’re absolutely asking Benedict to pay for his crimes in the back half.

A big trope of romance novels is the male hero saves the young woman. But when you have an actress as dynamic as Yerin Ha, it felt really important to see Sophie having a bit more of a hand in her own fate. So, we tried to preserve the element of Benedict being a dashing romantic hero by coming into the courtroom scene, but we wanted to give it some time to breathe. And I love the bravery when Sophie goes to Penwood House to confront the truth about her father’s will.

I wish we had longer to explore Benedict’s fluidity, but we knew people were really eager to get to his season, and that’s totally valid. We did talk about, is he hooking up with other people after he can’t find the Lady in Silver? But ultimately, his obsession with the Lady in Silver was meant to feel so all-consuming that we didn’t want to see him hooking up with anyone—man, woman, non-binary, it didn’t matter. We also didn’t really want to see him hooking up with someone once he met Sophie, as her true self. So, the answer is yes, in a perfect world, we would’ve had longer to play with that before Sophie, but given the circumstances, we felt like this was the line we wanted to tell.

After John’s death in episode seven, Francesca shares her dismay that she was unable to give her husband a child. Was that moment in acknowledgment of the character’s fertility struggles from her book?

We did want to honor the fertility storyline, and we will continue to honor the fertility storyline when we get to Francesca and Michaela’s season. That storyline also came out of a conversation about the surprising ways in which grief can present, and keeping Francesca’s grief grounded in who she is as a character. She seems likely to clutch to some kind of delusion to not have to look too deeply at her more difficult emotions. I don’t think she’s a character who’s very comfortable with her more complex emotions. So, it felt like a fresh and authentic representation of the weird ways grief can manifest.

The other remaining single adult Bridgerton sibling is Eloise, who this season seems to be opening herself up to the idea of finding forever love. How will that manifest for her future season?

We wanted to give Eloise an arc this season. I feel like we held back on changing her character too much in the past few seasons because we were further away from her own season, and we never want to get too ahead of the story. But after everything Eloise has been through, especially with Penelope and with Cressida in season three, it felt time for her to get to the point where…. It’s not that she’s abandoning her progressive ideals, but she is opening her heart and realizing that for other people, marriage really works, it can give them agency. So, I’m excited to see the ways in which that allows her to grow and change in season five.