Dearest Gentle Reader, if you have a Max subscription, it’s time to stop waiting by the window for Bridgerton Season 4, and get into a new romance series instead! While yes, the next season which is going to star Benedict and the debut of his love interest, Sophie, has officially been in production since fall, considering how long it takes to film a season we’re likely looking at a 2026 premiere date for the Netflix show. In the meantime, I just started getting into the TV adaptation of Like Water For Chocolate, and I absolutely recommend it.
There’ve been other shows like Bridgerton before, but this one hits the mark for how beautifully dramatic and epic the forbidden romance at the center of it is. Let me talk about why you need to tune into the new Max series:
What Is Like Water For Chocolate About?
Like Water For Chocolate is an adaptation of the Mexican novel of the same name by Laura Esquivel (originally Como agua para chocolate) and was previously made into a movie in 1992. The Spanish-language series follows a family of women living during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. The story centers on the domineering and single Mama Elena and her three daughters, Rosaura, Gertrudis and Tita. The youngest daughter, Tita, falls in love with a boy named Pedro as a girl and their bond continues into adulthood, where Pedro decides to ask for Tita’s hand in marriage. However, her mother has another fate for her in store: to have Tita remain unmarried and take care of her until she dies.
Why I’m Loving It, And I Think More Bridgerton Fans Will Too
As you can ascertain from the plotline, it’s by no means a carbon copy of Bridgerton; it’s totally it’s own thing. However, like Bridgerton, it takes place in a time when getting married was seen as a business agreement rather than a confession of love, and for some reason it’s always entertaining to me to see how that tension affected young people at that time. The plotline reminds me a tad of my favorite Bridgerton couple from Season 2, Kate and Anthony. Their romance first started when he proposed to her sister Edwina, even though as it turned out he longed for Kate.
As someone who has a sister myself, there’s something just biting about the idea of someone I love being snatched up by my sibling when I have my own feelings about them, and Like Water For Chocolate handles the deep emotions Tita is dealing with so well. Not only does Tita have to watch her lover marry her sister, she is basically being doomed to never find love again, and I’m so invested in how everything will play out in the week-to-week show, which only adds to the tension and yearning filling this show.
Like Water For Chocolate Is Also Reminiscent Of Two Another Romance Classics
The series was produced by Salma Hayek, who had a funny text exchange moment with her leading cast when they got the roles, which CinemaBlend learned when speaking to the show’s Tita and Gertrudis (Azul Guaita & Andrea Chaparro). They also told us that they were asked to watch the 2005 Pride & Prejudice because it informed the tone the series was going for. Guaita said she watched the Keira Knightley movie for the first time for her role of Tita and found it to be “like magic”. She also called the movie “a puzzle piece” that informed working on the series for her.
