As the streaming wars intensify, everyone wants a slice of the period drama pie. Led by the enormous success of Netflix’s flagship series Bridgerton, it’s clear just how big the market is for costume dramas, especially those boasting romance, theatrics, and extravagance in abundance. In its most recent fourth season, Bridgerton showed no signs of aging, actually improving on its previous installment. Season 4, Part 1 was watched by an impressive 6.4 million households during the live plus three-day period, marking a 52% boost over Season 3’s premiere, and helping the show reach #1 in the streaming ranks of 83 different countries.
But Bridgerton isn’t the only streaming-favorite costume drama growing in popularity. HBO‘s answer to the Shondaland series, The Gilded Age, debuted its long-awaited third season in mid-2025 to both critical acclaim and streaming success. The third-season finale, which premiered on August 10, scored a series-high five million viewers across all platforms in just three days, almost doubling the 2.7 million viewers reported for the season premiere. Throughout Season 3, the series climbed to new heights and kept breaking its own records, with the upcoming fourth season, expected to debut later this year, likely to continue that trend.
Recently, a first look at the fourth season was revealed in HBO’s sizzle reel for their upcoming productions, giving fans an early glimpse at Bertha (Carrie Coon), Larry (Harry Richardson), Marian (Louisa Jacobson), Peggy (Denée Benton), and more back in lavish action. Following the release of this first look, The Gilded Age has returned to the American streaming charts. At the time of writing, the series is one of the ten most-streamed shows on HBO Max in the U.S., a list unsurprisingly still topped by the controversial third season of Euphoria.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
What Did Critics Say About ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 3?
The third season of The Gilded Age didn’t just show the series going from strength to strength in viewing figures. After a well-received first outing and universal praise for the second, the third received gushing reviews from almost all, leading to a near-perfect, series-high 96% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. In a review of the third season for Collider, Carly Lane praised the series for not playing it safe and ushering in an “exciting future for The Gilded Age.”
The Gilded Age is available to stream on HBO Max. Stay tuned to Collider for more streaming stories.
