Netflix provide update on ‘Bridgerton’ season four release date
One of the biggest bugbears people have with the streaming era is the inordinate length of time that passes between seasons of the biggest shows available on the most popular platforms, something Bridgerton hasn’t been immune from.
The first season of creator Chris Van Dusen’s period drama dropped in December 2020, when it quickly became the most-watched original series in Netflix history. Unfortunately, nobody in the world of on-demand seems interested in striking when the iron is particularly hot.
It would be 15 months before the second run premiered in March 2022, and then there was another 26-month gap before the third and most recent run, and even that arrived in two parts separated by four weeks. Will the fourth season be landing any quicker than the rest? In short, no, it will not.
Even though casting news has been revealed and Bridgerton is currently in production, it’s going to be a long time before the finished article hits the airwaves. The show is expanding its reach to film on a new backlot at Shepperton Studios, with Bridgerton production designer Alison Gartshore spearheading the construction of bespoke sets that have turned two acres of Netflix’s property into the Regency era.
The third season was shot for eight months between July 2022 and March 2023 before landing on Netflix over a year later. With that in mind, if season four started rolling cameras in September 2024, principal photography will last until the middle of 2025.
Should it follow a similar post-production schedule, then it won’t be until late 2026 that subscribers get their next fix of Bridgerton. If it’s broken up into two parts again, as tends to be the case these days for almost all of Netflix’s most popular and most-watched originals, then viewers won’t be able to get their complete fix of season four until the winter of 2026 is beginning to close in.
Four seasons of television taking six years is nuts by conventional standards, but at least it’s still quicker than Stranger Things. The good old days of a high-profile series airing annually with 20+ episodes have increasingly become a thing of the past in the age of streaming, but at least the key creatives will be able to take solace in the fact that Bridgerton is guaranteed to be a smash hit from the second it hits Netflix, regardless of how long it takes to get to that point.