Newsletters: Even With Fewer Butts, ‘Bridgerton’ Is Still Worth Watching

Even With Fewer Butts, ‘Bridgerton’ Is Still Worth Watching

with Kevin Fallon

Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.

This week:

What to make of Bridgerton Season 2?
The unexpected staying power of Hulu's Life & Beth.
A diamond made of what now?
Go see Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum be hot!
Great series, great actress, perfect photo.

There Is One Very Handsome Reason to Watch Bridgerton

In the first episode of the new season of Bridgerton, you see star Jonathan Bailey's butt. It is a pleasant experience. This isn't particularly shocking. This is Bridgerton after all; Bailey's character was introduced derriere-first in the series pilot. No, the shocking thing is that you don't see it again.

That is unwelcome news for anyone who appreciated everything the first season of Bridgerton had to offer on its way to becoming one of the most popular Netflix series of all time, which is to say: Butts. Boobies. Butts and boobies in the context of sexy times. Season one of Bridgerton was a horny show.

I remember it clearly. It was Regé Jean-Page's butt.

The time: Christmas week 2020. The mood: nihilistic. Everything about our pandemic existence was frustrating, terrifying, mournful, and quite literally isolating. We were so grateful for his butt. It was maybe not constant, but frequent enough to make the whole "DEAR GOD, what is our lives right now???" of it all more palatable. Bridgerton was a fun, frothy, and carefully-crafted swoon of a period soap opera, and it was also gloriously frisky. Those things were inextricable from each other.

Much has been written in the lead-up to Bridgerton Season 2, which is finally available for streaming, about how remarkably sexless it is in comparison to the first season. In a manifesto that must be screamed from the rooftops, my colleague Laura Bradley raised the pointed question: "Who asked for a less horny Bridgerton?" She writes, "Sex scenes are few and far between, and even the hot-and-heavy interludes feel somehow… chaste. At the risk of sounding crass, I must ask: Where did all the butt shots go?"

I read this news before I screened the new season. I can't remember the last time a piece of writing pierced me with such tragedy, disappointment, and dread. And while I am, to quote my dear late grandmother Ruthmary when she had reached her maximum boiling point of anger, "pretty peeved right now" over this, I am also surprised and humbled to learn that after watching the season… and I can't believe I'm going to say this… I almost didn't care.

Thanks to Jonathan Bailey's exquisite lead performance and expert ability to be almost unbearably hot even while clothed—not to mention, you know, things like the show's writing being as sharp as ever and the grandness of its aesthetic even more wondrous—I quite enjoyed the new season anyway. Who am I?!

Not even the Deuxmoi of Regency England, Lady Whistledown herself, could've scripted this twist.

Here are things I enjoyed about the new season, beginning, like a broken record, with Bailey.

Yes, I, as did the world, loved Jean-Page's breakout performance. But, like the books it is based on, this series couldn't be better suited to a rotational structure, in which each season centers on a different character, thus minimizing—or, in his case, excising—other ones.

Bailey's Anthony Bridgerton is both a familiar type—the brooding gentleman torn between duty and desire—and one with more depth than you might expect from a character that could easily be written off as Generic Handsome British Man as Romantic Lead in Period Piece. He has an exceptional ability to carry his angst, pain, and guilt with him without bogging down things into a somber drag. There's a refreshing levity to him, in spite of the over-the-top seriousness that a soap opera like this requires.

Anthony was thrust into the position of caring for his family at too young an age, when his father suddenly died. Now that it is time to marry, he feels a responsibility to choose a practical spouse who would help maintain the family's status rather than open himself up to the idea of love, passion or romance. When the Sharma sisters, Kate (Simone Ashley) and Edwina (Charithra Chandran), arrive, he eyes Edwina as a partner because she checks every logical box. Things are only complicated when, after a combative start, he and Kate, who are more like each other than either care to admit, ignite an undeniable romantic spark.

While, yes, egregiously light on sex scenes, the beats of this plot are incredibly gratifying. They are also incredibly obvious. Anyone with any familiarity with romantic dramas and comedies could spot each development coming a mile away. Thank god! What is a series like Bridgerton if not indulgent?

We are watching it for a very specific experience, and that experience is to watch people fall in love the way they do in romantic dramas and comedies. That the series thwacks each beat with the force of a mallet on a croquet ball is wonderful. Give us what we want! And, better yet, do it with the immense scale, lavish production design, and sweeping cinematography that Bridgerton has the budget to serve up.

This is a series that, in the new season, stages a love connection amidst a massive set piece that includes a choreographed dance number set to an all-strings version of Robyn's "Dancing On My Own." In what universe am I not eating every second of this up? And, by the way: After you see it, come back to me and let's talk. The way Bailey smolders at Ashley and then whispers in her ear is perhaps the most pornographic thing I've seen on TV. How many prizes can we give Bailey for that gaze alone?

Yes, it is more basic bitch of me than I care to admit to be drooling this aggressively over Bailey's performance. Not sorry!

He is also openly gay, which I'd like to mention because it's so cool and casual that the sexy romantic lead on the biggest romantic TV series in the world just happens to be a gay man and no one cares. I mean, I care, because I enjoy the fact that I get to spend hours a day fantasizing about our life together as husbands. (His butt features more prominently in these fantasies than it does in Bridgerton.)

But the way that this isn't some seismic event is the kind of progress that is so welcome, I almost feel gross acknowledging it because it makes it into the very "thing" that it's so nice it isn't. It's just that, as the future Mr. Kevin Fallon-Bailey, I'm proud of my man.

Contemplating Life & Happiness With Life & Beth

Amy Schumer will be among the three hosts, alongside Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall, at Sunday's Oscar ceremony. There, I imagine you'll get to see Schumer in familiar territory: Telling topical jokes in front of a laughing audience.

It's a major platform at a fascinating time in her career.

The comedian also just announced a stand-up tour—again, familiar territory—but also recently launched a series on Hulu called Life & Beth, which she created, wrote, directed, and starred in, and which reveals her in a fresh and thrilling way that many, even her fans, might have never expected.

In her review of the series for The Daily Beast, Emma Fraser wrote of Schumer, "It does seem like the more she is critiqued the more she bares her soul." The dramedy is immensely personal, flitting back and forth between the character of Beth, who is inspired by Schumer, as a girl navigating complicated relationships with her parents, and as an adult at a crossroads when it comes to her career, her love life, and her sense of worth.

You'd be wise to check out the show, which has all its episodes available for streaming. "Lovely" is an apt term to describe it, though that can sound patronizing and might discount how sharp and funny it often is. But it packs a poignant punch that has stuck with me in a way that I maybe hadn't noticed the intensity of at first, like an emotional bruise that intensifies as time passes.

When Life & Beth begins, something terrible happens in Adult Beth's life. It is the first domino to fall of several terrible things that happen. These events accelerate what Beth had already been thinking: that her life needed to change.

At the center of the series, I think, is the question: Could you be happier? I mean, raise your hand if, especially over the last two years, you haven't pondered that when it comes to at least one element of your life. (If we were in a stadium right now, I'd expect we'd all be doing the wave.)

What Life & Beth really hits on is both the bravery and the fear that question entails. Contrary to what "happy" actually means, it is maybe the scariest thing there is in life. It's precarious. It's mythical. It's fleeting. There's a reason why, in real life, there aren't the grand gestures and sweeping moments we cherish in TV and film. They're not logical. They're not guaranteed. And they could be miscalculations, the wrong thing to do, a delusion, or cause real, irreparable hurt.

But… what happens if they don't? What if they really do make you happier? What would it take for you to take that chance?

The great thing about Life & Beth is how it translates formative moments in Schumer's life, which, of course, is a life of celebrity that includes things like hosting the goddamn Academy Awards, into a real-world scale: an even playing field on which you can understand and appreciate what a bold thing it is to claim your worth, to validate the idea that you should and could be happy. Where you commiserate with the fear involved, the inertia, and the possible regret.

It's a great series that affected me more deeply than I might have realized. You should check it out, too.

Diamonds Are a Salad's Best Friend

It has come to my attention that a diamond made from ranch dressing was recently sold for $12,500 on eBay. I have so many questions, such as: What?

According to Time Out magazine, "Hidden Valley Ranch hired a professional diamond maker to heat-blast its ranch dressing to 2,500 degrees and then crush the resulting charred dressing under 400 tons of pressure. Five months later, voila! The two-carat (carrot? It is for the salad, right?) round brilliant-cut diamond was placed in a 14k white gold band with the engraving HVR LVR: 'Hidden Valley Ranch Lover.'"

I now have second thoughts about throwing out the bottle of ranch dressing that had been sitting in the back of my refrigerator for, if I'm being conservative, about four-and-a-half years. Surely if I had plopped that sucker next to a classic New York City furnace, I could have replicated those results and been a cool 12 grand richer.

To quote Melissa McCarthy in the best piece of pop culture that has ever existed about ranch dressing, a subcategory of entertainment one never expects to reference in their career, "That cash could really get me out of a couple of jams." While I start plotting my Ranch dressing jewelry empire, do yourself a favor and watch McCarthy's SNL skit, one of the Top 10 Things That Make Me Laugh Most in Life, Non-Fart Category.

A Very Good Movie for You to See

Every time I talk to a friend about the new film The Lost City, they get excited and say how they can't wait for it because it's "the kind of movie they don't make anymore."

The big-budget action comedy starring very famous celebrities like Sandra Bullock is a genre that didn't used to be so niche it required all those words to describe. They were great, and, for some reason (cough, the rise of comic-book movies, cough), Hollywood stopped making them, leaving people like me and all my friends with nothing but TBS's Sunday afternoon lineup as a big-budget action comedy graveyard to visit.

So, I beg of you, go see The Lost City. It is a hoot! Will it factor into the Oscars next year? Of course not! But let it be what it is: A movie in which Sandra Bullock is fun, and Channing Tatum is fun, and Brad Pitt is fun, and Daniel Radcliffe is fun, and the whole thing is fun. Maybe, then, they'll start making more movies like this again and I can finally shut up about it.

The Gilded Pepperoni

If you follow a gay person on social media then you have seen this photo of Carrie Coon in her Gilded Age wardrobe eating a slice of pizza, as it has been posted so many times I think it legally must now be incorporated into the Pride flag. If not, enjoy!

The Lost City: Please. I beg of you. Also, you see Channing Tatum's butt! (Fri. in theaters)

Julia: A very charming series about Julia Child. Imagine, now, my hideous impression of her saying, "Bon appétit!" (Thurs. on HBO Max)

Starstruck: I'm just a guy, standing in front of all of you, insisting that you watch this deceptively brilliant rom-com series. (Now on HBO Max)

Infinite Storm: Someone save Naomi Watts' career! This is an emergency! (Fri. in theaters)

American Song Contest: It brings me no pleasure—pain, actually—to say that something involving Kelly Clarkson is not good. (Mon. on NBC)

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Even With Fewer Butts, ‘Bridgerton’ Is Still Worth Watching

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