‘Bridgerton’ Season 3 Gave Us Some of the Best Steamy Scenes of 2024 

We’ve lived entire lives since Season 3 of Bridgerton dropped on Netflix earlier this year. I don’t even remember the person I was when Season 3, Part 2 released four episodes in June, let alone Part 1, which came a whole month earlier in May. And while I have to search the recesses of my mind to remember what I was even doing with my life as the summer months rolled in (I think I was in my baking bread phase, maybe?!), I do remember feeling grateful for some of the sexiest scenes that Bridgerton has produced thus far.

In Season 3 of the acclaimed Netflix drama, we finally saw our wallflower Featherington daughter, Penelope (Nicola Coughlan), embrace her beauty and brilliance and chase down a marriage match with a previously unsuspecting Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton). In the first two seasons, Colin and Penelope were simply good friends with a nasty case of unrequited love on Penelope’s part. Readers of the Julia Quinn book series the show is based on — and anyone with half a brain, honestly — could see that the pair were being teed up to fall in love, although with the show going out of order from the novels and making changes for the small screen, it was unclear how they would get there.

Thankfully, however, the Netflix gods and Bridgerton executive producers listened to the fans who could not wait one more season to see Colin and Penelope’s story unfold. And once it came, I was not disappointed. Unlike Season 2, which saw Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) experiencing a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers plot — a.k.a. holding us in sex-pectation until the later episodes — Season 3 ended its first half with a scene so steamy, it became an online reference known only by two words: carriage scene.

For quite some time, you could not scroll more than five videos on TikTok or look at your Instagram feed or stories without seeing some reference to this scene. The moment — which comes in Season 3, Episode 4, “Old Friends” — sees Colin finally realizing his love for his longtime best friend and chasing her down after she left the ball in tears following the dissolution of her only real marriage match with Lord Debling (Sam Phillips). It was Colin’s own selfish (and welcome!) actions that led to Debling backing out of his marriage proposal to Penelope, need I remind you? So when he pulls up on her carriage as it’s leaving the ball, he is all hot and bothered and so is she.

After a battle of wits and words, the two finally get to a steamy makeout session — set to an instrumental version of Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” — and end up doing a lot (but not the whole damn deed) in the back of a carriage on the way to the Featherington residence. Colin, who is very experienced thanks to his escapades with hookers doesn’t take Penelope, a true novice, very far but does make her eyes roll back with his hands, if you know what I mean. Sadly, the clip below only goes as far as YouTube would allow without Netflix getting in trouble, but you can imagine hands going up skirts. You can also go to roughly 47 minutes into the episode to keep the carriage rolling…

The scene is only made hotter by the last line of Part 1 being, “For God’s sake, Penelope Featherington. Are you going to marry me or not?” Immediate gasp.

In Part 2, the stakes get even higher as Penelope struggles to reveal her Lady Whisteldown identity to her fiancé, making their sexy scenes a twinge hotter. And boy, are there some sexy, sexy moments in the second half of the season.

Not only does Season 3, Episode 5, “Tick Tock,” feature the longest sex scene in the show’s history — more than five minutes of bliss where Penelope and Colin get it on in their future home, it copies a scene straight from Romancing Mister Bridgerton, the book where Colin and Penelope fall in love. The straight-from-the-page mirror scene in which Colin undresses Penelope in front of a mirror is just one of the best examples of the faithfulness of the series. The scene sees Coughlan strip off all her layers and then partake in the lengthy sex scene where they also break a chaise while popping Penelope’s cherry.

According to Coughlan, she was actively fighting for certain scenes — including her going fully naked — to be included in the season. So not only do we have to thank her for being hot and talented, we must express our gratitude for being a confident woman.

“It just felt like the biggest ‘f**k you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body,” Coughlan told Stylist around the time of the show’s release. “It was amazingly empowering. I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how f**king hot I looked!’ Not only did I consent to it, but I drove it.”

And we are grateful for it. So much so that as I have come to the end of the year and have started thinking back on the best shows, movies, and books of 2024, Bridgerton Season 3 cannot leave my mind. The sex scenes — and Penelope’s storyline, in general — are really the gifts that I am thankful for this year.

Now we wait impatiently for Season 4 — a.k.a Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and Sophie Baek’s (Yerin Ha) — time to shine. Until then, we will just have to keep watching the other seasons to feel something.

Bridgerton Seasons 1-3 are currently streaming on Netflix.