Bridgerton season 3 is its best yet. The fractured friendship between Penelope and Eloise centers the Netflix hit.
Throughout those first two seasons, however, the show has steadily built the characters whose plot now fuels season three — shockingly not a romance, but rather the broken friendship between the second-eldest Bridgerton sister, Eloise (Claudia Jessie), and her longtime bestie Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan). The two fell out at the end of season two over a reveal we learned at the end of season one: the identity of Lady Whistledown, the pseudonymous gossip writer whose salacious poison pen has repeatedly meddled in the affairs of both families.
This is the storyline the show has been working toward the entire time, and the resulting angst yields the best season yet. But while season three also dapples the landscape with more courtship per capita than we’ve seen yet, it also undermines each of these couples, both familiar and new, by devoting too little time to them. Instead, it saves its biggest emotional wallops for the moments when Eloise and Pen moon longingly at each other across crowded rooms.
In fact, Bridgerton’s third season simultaneously reveals its biggest weakness to be its biggest strength: The show was never about the romances at all.
What makes a good romance? Yes, you need to have the swoony, heady moments when fingers touch or gazes meet or bosoms heave. Yet none of that means anything if you aren’t connected to the characters enjoying those delicious moments. The best romances make us feel that these people were drawn to each other through aligned personalities and innate chemistry. The second quality isn’t always easy to deliver, but the first comes down to writing — and writing has never been Bridgerton’s strong point.
The goal of season one boiled down to reinventing the bodice-ripper for modern audiences, so the characterization of our main couple, Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and her beau Simon (Regé-Jean Page), was far less important than how utterly hot Page looked in a pair of tight Regency trousers. Additionally, the pair had a fundamental personality clash — his deep opposition to having kids — that formed the main conflict of the season, so they barely got a chance to show us how much they liked each other before their relationship derailed and had to be hastily (and problematically) amended.
In between all the screen time devoted to these couples, however, Bridgerton has steadily evolved the friendship between Penelope — Pen for short — and Eloise. Each is a society misfit whose contrasts and independence from their respective families make them perfect complements as friends. For two seasons, we’ve seen them confide in each other, delight in each other, and trust one another with the pure-heartedness of a lifelong friendship — until, that is, Eloise figures out Pen’s deepest, darkest secret: She’s the scurrilous gossip-monger behind Lady Whistledown.
