The ‘Bridgerton’ Season 4 Part 2 Release Date Is Another Disappointment

Bridgerton season 4 premiered yesterday on Netflix, but as ever, it’s only half of it. Netflix has decided to keep its increasingly exhausting tradition alive by splitting a season of a popular series in two, which in some cases has now been upgraded to three cuts, as recently seen with Stranger Things.

The Bridgerton season 4 part 2 release date of February 26 once again causes fans to have to hit pause in the middle of the story, and it causes showrunners to have to insert at least some level of cliffhanger right as episode 4 hits, given that they now must encourage people to return for more.

Netflix’s rule, generally speaking, is that they air all season 1s of shows in full binge format. But if they take off, they often get scooped up and chopped into bits to seemingly do nothing but encourage two months of subscriptions, rather than a sign-up, binge, and cancel, as many are prone to do with streaming services. You can wait until February to binge Bridgerton season 5 all at once, but that requires dodging social media spoilers for a month and being left out of the fandom conversation.

A month-long wait is an awkward period, to the point that the second half of the season no doubt loses more viewers than it would have if it had aired all at once. And given that Netflix is all about the metric of how many people watch all episodes of a show, it remains confusing.

A recent example is Wednesday, which set a record for the most views ever for an English-language series on Netflix. Then season 2 returned, split in half, and it got… less than half the views of season 1. Some of that may have been the interminable wait, but there had to have been some level of drop-off due to that split. It’s also the cast that, at least currently, Stranger Things season 5, the grand, blockbuster finale of the entire series, currently has fewer views than season 4, though there are still more views to be registered from the second two parts, as the show was split in two.

Netflix doesn’t do this with every big show. For Squid Game’s return, they didn’t split season 2 in half, but that was likely because season 3 was only six months later, and that was effectively one big, split season on its own.

I’ve said this many times, but from a viewership perspective, it’s the worst option available for fans. A binge release would be a traditional Netflix release, and that’s why most people hew to the service in the first place. Week-to-week, something Netflix desperately avoids, would both stretch conversation about the series, get plenty of return viewership, and still have audiences sign up for two or even three months to see the entire thing. This 4/4 or 5/5 or 4/3/1 split (in Stranger Things’ case) never stops being exhausting, and this years-long trend needs to end.

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