At this rate it’s going take 16 years to get through all the siblings

Ask any die-hard Bridgerton fan this one question and they’ll answer straight away: How long did it take you to watch season one of Bridgerton for the first time? It personally took me about eight hours in one go on Boxing Day 2020. My mum and I watched the entire thing in a somewhat comatose state in one sitting, and I’d wager that’s the case for many others.

And why was it possible to watch the whole season in such a short space of time? Because it was only eight episodes. Our dismay at how short the season was was lessened by our hope that it being such a short series meant the next season couldn’t be far along. Oh, how wrong we were. The next season didn’t grace our screens until over two years later.

I knew then we were in this for the long haul. For months, I scoured the internet desperate for just a hint of when season three would be finally released, to no avail. Luckily, Queen Charlotte satiated Bridgerton fans for a while last year before the release of season three was finally announced, but even a year between two six-to-eight episodes-long seasons seems like a bit of a stretch. The show runners claim to want to speed things up, but I just think two years is taking the piss a bit now.

It’s getting to the point where I wonder if these insanely long waits between seasons of TV shows will be the death of television: Who’s still going to be watching Bridgerton in 10 years’ time?

via Netflix

There just aren’t enough episodes

As many other frustrated Bridgerton fans have pointed out, each season only has eight hour-long episodes. It’s not like they’re churning out huge amounts of content. One TikTok user said it was “just laziness at this point”, and I have to say I kind of agree. I just can’t see the justification for taking so long to make eight episodes of a show that doesn’t employ particularly much, if any, CGI.

It’s not just the frustration with the fact that it quite simply should not take this long to produce such a short amount of screen time, but also that fans spend years waiting for release dates, only to resign to watch it all in one sitting, and instantly feeling like you’ve wasted your time anticipating the new release for so long.

Every new season I’ve had the increasing feeling that it’s just not worth the wait at this point, not because of the quality of the show (because I am of the unpopular opinion that season three is possibly the Bridgerton team’s best work yet), but because I devour it in eight hours, after which I am faced with the reality that I have to wait another two years just to sit down and do the same thing again. It just feels so anticlimactic.

It was the same issue with Euphoria. While the consensus is that, sadly, we will probably never get a season three of that show, the wait between the two seasons we do have was almost three years. People lose interest, and fandoms start to dissipate when you have to wait around this long.

via Netflix

Shows used to produce episodes once a week, around 22 times a year

Another thing that really irritates a lot of fans about this long wait is the fact that TV shows used to churn out weekly episodes, with 22 per season instead of the measly eight that has grown so popular in the last half decade or so.

Shows like Friends – which was filmed in front of a live audience! – operated on this schedule. Granted, the episodes where much shorter, but there were so many of them it really didn’t make a difference. Say each one is 20 minutes long, so that’s three for every hour-long Bridgerton episode, meaning 24 episodes and roughly the same amount of time per season. The difference being that Friends seasons went out yearly.

A show like Pretty Little Liars makes this even more infuriating when you realise those episodes were 45 minutes long each, the same number of episodes is a once again, yearly, season. Beloved Bridgerton screenwriter Shonda Rhimes also worked on Grey’s Anatomy for years, which is notorious for its near-constant release of episodes. I just don’t understand why she can’t do the same with Bridgerton?

They literally already have the source material to hand

Another point raised on TikTok by many is the fact that it’s not exactly like the writers are coming up with original plots by themselves – they literally have a whole published book series to do that for them.

While the writers’ team might have tweaked some plot points in Julia Quinn’s famed novels, the fact that they already know exactly the direction each season has to go in surely should give them a bit of a boost in writing them. I’ve taken to slowly reading my way through the series when in a Bridgerton draught, but there’s only so long a book can take me to read, and it certainly isn’t enough to satisfy me for two years.

via Netflix

The whole thing will take another 10 years at this rate

If you consider there fact that there are eight Bridgerton siblings, three of whom have already had their seasons, five more will literally take another decade to get filmed. If we go in age order, that will make Hyacinth, the iconic youngest Bridgerton who was 12 in the last season, 22 by the time she finally gets hers – much older than the age most Regency women were expected to marry at. The actress, Florence Hunt, will be in her late twenties by that point.

Many people online have pointed out that the actors will age faster than their characters. Obviously, Nicola Coughlan is famously immortal and literally does not age, being 37 and playing a 19 to 20-year-old Penelope, but holding her female colleagues to ageing standards does not seem like a good move.

Also, in a decade’s time I will literally be 30 years old, waiting for the finale of a show I have been watching since the age of 16. I just find that insane.

It also makes me question why the actors have committed to the show for so long. Obviously, some will leave and I imagine people like Hyacinth and Gregory will likely be recasted in time, but characters like Violet Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte are surely in it for the long haul? I just wonder how they’ve agreed to take part in a show that will take so much time to produce that they’ll have so little screen time in compared to other projects they could participate in.

I get that the show requires an awful lot of work for location sourcing, costuming and the like, but if they don’t get it together I fear people will lose interest and the show’s hype will die out before its time.