Karly

There’s a genre of media criticism online that increasingly makes me feel like people want every piece of fiction to undergo an HR compliance review before they’re allowed to enjoy it.

Recently I saw a creator complaining about the lack of professional pursuits in Bridgerton, specifically the fact that so many of the characters seem to exist entirely within drawing rooms, promenades, orchestral covers of pop songs, and aggressively decorative social rituals, and while I understand the observation on paper, I also found myself thinking: yes… and?

Because what exactly are we hoping to achieve here? A spin-off where Benedict opens Excel? Colin in middle management? Anthony Bridgerton attending quarterly budget meetings while stress-eating biscuits? To be fair, Anthony in a meeting stress-eating biscuits is the most likely scenario…

The criticism essentially boiled down to the idea that Anthony inherits the estate so the other brothers should realistically need respectable professions, and that the show lacks realism because so many characters appear to simply float through life attending balls and eating tiny pastries under chandeliers, but I fear this fundamentally misunderstands the assignment. Every single actor from Bridgerton has more or less said the same thing in interviews: take it with a grain of salt. This is not a documentary. They are not reconstructing Regency England with painstaking anthropological precision. They are serving fantasy, spectacle, yearning, gossip, beauty, and emotional excess in jewel tones. They are serving cunt, frankly.

And honestly? I don’t want realism from these people. If I had to watch the Bridgertons actually work for a living I think it would psychologically damage me because these are individuals who do not know how to light a fire, boil an egg, or heat up milk without assistance. They live in a world where problems are solved through dramatic eye contact and handwritten letters delivered by footmen. They are fictional aristocrats. They survive exclusively on pastries, yearning, and inherited wealth. Why on earth would I want to watch them file paperwork?

Now, the creator also mentioned that Sophie’s storyline in Season 4 introduces an element of realism through the downstairs staff and the working world beneath the glittering façade, and I actually agree that this is interesting territory because one of the strengths of period drama has always been the tension between upstairs and downstairs worlds, privilege and labour, fantasy and reality, and I hope the series continues exploring that dynamic because it adds texture to the universe. But there’s a difference between adding layers to a fictional world and demanding that every aristocratic character suddenly become economically productive in a modern sense just to satisfy contemporary anxieties around labour and usefulness.

I think this obsession with practicality says something quite bleak about the way we consume fiction now, because increasingly people seem unable to let stories exist as heightened emotional experiences without interrogating them for realism, productivity, or moral efficiency. Everything must justify itself intellectually. Characters can’t simply exist within an aesthetic or romantic fantasy without somebody asking about estate taxes or pension structures or whether they’ve considered a career in finance.

And perhaps this is why so many people now struggle with stories built primarily on atmosphere, ritual, longing, or beauty, because we’ve become so trained to consume media through the lens of optimisation and realism that we’ve forgotten that fiction has always involved exaggeration and selective focus. Nobody watches Bridgerton because they desperately want a historically accurate breakdown of Regency employment opportunities for second sons. We are there for the yearning. The gloves. The orchestral pop covers. The gazebos. The slow-burn tension so intense it threatens national stability.

Sometimes art exists simply to delight us a little, and I think we need to protect that instinct instead of flattening every fictional world into a productivity seminar.