Bridgerton often feels divided between two impulses. There’s the sexy stuff appealing directly to the romance-genre aficionados who grew up on Mr. Darcy’s hand flex and want to know what happened behind closed doors — the secret make-outs, the chaise-longue trysts , Benedict’s bisexual ménage à trois that seems to last a week.
It’s risqué. It’s sensual. It’s pleasant to watch two hot people press their faces together.
All of that must be balanced, though, by Bridgerton ’s guiding philosophy of acceptance and forgiveness. This show isn’t just Regency smut; it’s a fantasy in which people, after a long sequence of miscommunication, finally find common ground and put aside their past grievances. Bridgerton has spent three seasons expanding its big tent (or, say, its big balloon ) to include all kinds of people who have previously done wrong and give them a second chance at acceptance and even love.
So why couldn’t it do the same for Jessica Madsen’s Cressida Cowper ? For all of Bridgerton ’s unevenly executed racial diversity , there’s something a little easy about making Cressida — the tall, thin, blonde woman with the aggressive fashion sense — one of its only unambiguous villains. The series treats her like Heather Chandler or Regina George, a smirking bully whose cruelty toward Penelope is practically reflexive but whose intelligence can’t compete with our favorite scribe. What she lacks in smarts she makes up for in brazenness, lying t.