Dearest Gentle Reader, if you have a Max subscription, it’s time to stop waiting by the window for Bridgerton Season 4, and get into a new romance series instead! While yes, the next season which is going to star Benedict and the debut of his love interest, Sophie, has officially been in production since fall, considering how long it takes to film a season we’re likely looking at a 2026 premiere date for the Netflix show. In the meantime, I just started getting into the TV adaptation of Like Water For Chocolate, and I absolutely recommend it.
There've been other shows like Bridgerton before, but this one hits the mark for how beautifully dramatic and epic the forbidden romance at the center of it is. Let me talk about why you need to tune into the new Max series:
What Is Like Water For Chocolate About?
Like Water For Chocolate is an adaptation of the Mexican novel of the same name by Laura Esquivel (originally Como agua para chocolate) and was previously made into a movie in 1992. The Spanish-language series follows a family of women living during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. The story centers on the domineering and single Mama Elena and her three daughters, Rosaura, Gertrudis and Tita. The youngest daughter, Tita, falls in love with a boy named Pedro as a girl and their bond continues into adulthood, where Pedro decides to ask for Tita’s hand in marriage. However, her mother has another fate for her in store: to have Tita remain unmarried and take care of her until she dies.
But Mama Elena does want to marry her eldest daughter off. In a heartbreaking decision for the young lovers, Pedro agrees to marry Rosaura in an effort to at least be close to his beloved Tita. This is the crux of the incredible drama that starts to unfold in the first episode of Like Water For Chocolate, which is already streaming on Max. It’s only the beginning of a truly juicy story that Esquivel cooked up in her novel and has led it to be so highly regarded for the past 35 years.
Why I’m Loving It, And I Think More Bridgerton Fans Will Too
As you can ascertain from the plotline, it’s by no means a carbon copy of Bridgerton; it's totally it's own thing. However, like Bridgerton, it takes place in a time when getting married was seen as a business agreement rather than a confession of love, and for some reason it’s always entertaining to me to see how that tension affected young people at that time. The plotline reminds me a tad of my favorite Bridgerton couple from Season 2, Kate and Anthony. Their romance first started when he proposed to her sister Edwina, even though as it turned out he longed for Kate.
As someone who has a sister myself, there’s something just biting about the idea of someone I love being snatched up by my sibling when I have my own feelings about them, and Like Water For Chocolate handles the deep emotions Tita is dealing with so well. Not only does Tita have to watch her lover marry her sister, she is basically being doomed to never find love again, and I’m so invested in how everything will play out in the week-to-week show, which only adds to the tension and yearning filling this show.
Like Water For Chocolate Is Also Reminiscent Of Two Another Romance Classics
The series was produced by Salma Hayek, who had a funny text exchange moment with her leading cast when they got the roles, which CinemaBlend learned when speaking to the show’s Tita and Gertrudis (Azul Guaita & Andrea Chaparro). They also told us that they were asked to watch the 2005 Pride & Prejudice because it informed the tone the series was going for. Guaita said she watched the Keira Knightley movie for the first time for her role of Tita and found it to be “like magic”. She also called the movie “a puzzle piece” that informed working on the series for her.
Additionally, Like Water For Chocolate reminds me of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women movie for other reasons. Obviously there’s the aspect of there being sisters living with their sole mother, and like that movie, I think the sisters all feel true to dynamics of sisters and how difficult it can be when each of them are so different, but being asked to be a certain way to fit into the molds of the society they are in.
The Novel’s Magical Realism Brings Something Different To The Genre, Too
While Bridgerton has always had a specific whimsy to it, this series has a more brooding quality by comparison. Still, I think Bridgerton fans will love dipping into the stories inherent magical realism, which is a huge part of the novel as well. Amidst Tita dealing with her pain, she spends a lot of time doing what she loves, which is cooking and baking. The novel is famous for having a Mexican recipe with each chapter that correlates with what the protagonist is dealing with and each episode of Like Water For Chocolate adapts some of these recipes into the TV show in an incredibly mouth-watering way.
But there’s a twist. Not only does Tita know how to bake a beautiful dish, whatever feelings she has when she makes her recipe affects all those who eat it. As you can imagine, as Tita deals with the myriad of emotions that comes with her particular situation, her cooking and baking will incite those around her to have some weird side effects that really start to work into the plotline. I’ll also tease that things like ghosts and such are not off the table for this series either. It’s different from Bridgerton, but for those who are fans of the Netflix series, I think somehow they’ll love what this show brings to the table.
New episodes of Like Water For Chocolate arrive on Max on Sundays. I hope you get into it and enjoy it as much as I am!
