The Fatherless Fantasy Of ‘Bridgerton’

In the world of Netflix’s Bridgerton, the wildly popular Regency romance adapted from an equally popular book series, some things are constant: The women wear organza and brocade gowns; everyone takes long walks in manicured parks, and longer reclines in ornate sitting rooms; there is always a ball to attend; and these balls will feature string-quartet covers of modern pop songs. Everyone is trying to find their love match, and everyone is desperate to impress the queen. The women are women—pure, proper, dainty, skilled at the pianoforte or embroidery—and the men—strong, brusk, and sexually experienced—are men. Racism has largely been vanquished, but patriarchy triumphs. Actual patriarchs, however, do not fare so well. There’s something else that remains constant throughout every season of Bridgerton : All the dads are dead.

Yes, all the fathers are deceased. I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never noticed—it’s not an obvious conceit of the show as much as a quiet pattern, like the showrunners are trying to MKUltra millennial women into believing that you can only fall in love if your father exists solely in postmortem flashback. But it’s true. Each season follows a different Bridgerton sibling as they find love in high-society London, and their father Edmund is dead, so that’s half of the lovers’ dads in one go. But their romantic counterparts are also always fatherless: The Duke of Hastings, Kate Sharma, and Sophie Baek, the love interests of the first, second, and fourth seasons, respectively, have lost their fathers to unidentified illness, while Penelope Featherington, fortunate enough to have a living albeit somewhat distant father through most of the first season, loses him to murderous bookies by the time her love story arises in Season 3. Even the young Queen Charlotte, whose story is told in the show’s eponymous spinoff series, is apparently fatherless; it’s her brother who arranges her marriage to the recently ascended King George. George, obviously, just lost his father, too.

But while the protagonists may be fatherless by the time of their courtship, the show is sort of daddy-obsessed. Mothers are always telling their sons what their father would have thought of their behavior (usually negative, at the beginning, and positive toward the end when the young man has found love); young lovers are either aspiring to the love their parents had, or actively seeking to avoid it. Each of the seasons’ lovers has some kind of daddy issue which drives the narrative. Simon’s abusive father was desperate to maintain his bloodline, and the season’s main conflict centers around Simon’s refusal to have children as revenge. Antony’s father was a good, dutiful patriarch, and as a result, Antony struggles to negotiate a perceived conflict between his affections and his obligations as the head of the Bridgerton household. Kate is eager to marry off her younger sister, abandoning the possibility of her own participation in the marriage mart, because her father’s death has left her responsible for the family. Penelope’s absent father threatens her propriety—her season is characterized by regular reminders that she has “no male relation” to sponsor her through the marriage mart, a high-intensity environment in which she’s been consistently rejected due to her domineering mother, her family’s bad reputation, and her general inexperience with talking to men. And Sophie, of the show’s most recent season, is the illegitimate child of a nobleman who promised always to protect and provide for her. After his death, her stepmother asserts that her father left her nothing in his will, forcing Sophie out of high society and into work as a maid.