Review: Bridgerton season 3 is its best because of Pen and Eloise's ...

Here’s a confession worthy of a scandal sheet: Bridgerton isn’t actually that great at romance. For two seasons now, the smash Netflix series has rejuvenated the tired, tricky genre, primarily by wholeheartedly embracing its pleasures while giving us modern quirks and a cast full of eye candy to make the tropes worth showing up for.

Yet throughout those seasons, the series has struggled to give its romances real depth. Whether our main characters were indulging in their unrestrained sexual passions (season one) or flinging themselves into self-imposed Austenian repression (season two), Bridgerton’s focal pairings so far have felt rote and bland.

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.

By contrast, season two offered what to many fans is the most beloved ship in the Bridgerton pantheon, but resorted to relying on bored Austenian tropes to get them together. The couple, Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and his hot frenemy Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley), had the potential to form a real, well-written connection, but the show was far more interested in having them exchange sultry looks and generic banter instead of selling us on their characters being soulmates.

Nicola Coughlin as Penelope, post-season 3 glowup. Liam Daniel/Netflix

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.

What makes this revelation worse is that Pen, on multiple occasions, has used the scandal sheet and its influence to manipulate society’s opinion about both of their families. The end of season one saw her humiliating the love interest of Eloise’s brother Colin (Luke Newton) — Pen’s secret long-held crush — in order to save him from scandal and ruin. The end of season two saw her pulling a similar move on Eloise, mortifying her through the scandal sheet in order to save her from an even worse fate.

Although her gambles paid off, they won Lady Whistledown the enmity of both Bridgertons and set the stage for Eloise’s feelings of betrayal: Her best friend not only stabbed her in the back but also withheld a huge secret from her. Their confrontation, and the resulting anger and heartbreak on all sides, carries forward into season three, which finds Pen riddled with guilt and Eloise desperately missing her but unable to forgive her. In her bitterness, Eloise has befriended Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen), a rich mean girl whose desperation to avoid an arranged marriage leads her to compete directly, and cruelly, with Penelope on the marriage market, much to Eloise’s chagrin.

Meanwhile, Colin finally gives Penelope the love she’s always wanted; but although the two get hot and steamy, even the show seems to recognize this isn’t the relationship we’re really here for. Despite the years Pen has spent pining for Colin, the show pairs them off without much fuss to make way for the real relationship conflict between Pen and Eloise. Of course, Eloise’s conflict is also Colin’s conflict — they both hate Lady Whistledown, after all — but the storyline positions him, and even Pen’s relationship with him, as collateral damage in the showdown between our two estranged besties.

In the background of this unfolding drama, no fewer than eight other couples are vying for our attention — all straight, of course. A total of four Bridgerton siblings as well as their mother have love interests this season, including last season’s Anthony, who cavorts in the background with new bride Kate.

The most interesting pairing of the lot involves a Bridgerton sister who barely existed on the show before this season — Francesca (Hannah Dodd), who, due to a casting change, was absent for most of season one and all of season two. She returns just in time to fall for a quiet, socially awkward earl, John Stirling (Victor Alli), whose quirks align with her own shy and retiring nature.

If the series follows closely the original Bridgerton novels upon which it’s based, then it’s possible there’s a larger plot reason for this relationship being given short shrift as there may be bigger things in store for Francesca down the line. But it’s equally possible Bridgerton is trying to condense as many storylines as it can into as few seasons as it can, to avoid the Netflix curse of canceled series with too many dangling plot threads.

Whatever the reason, the season has its work cut out for it, cramming so many relationships into each episode. It makes for a tightly structured plot with a loosely written confection of couples to choose from. If Pen and Colin aren’t holding your interest, perhaps Pen’s shallow sisters and their incongruously attractive new husbands, whose affections they seem blithely incapable of appreciating, will be your faves.

Perhaps the still-inexplicably-straight Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and his fling with a mysterious widow, Lady Arnold (Hannah New) will entice you in the lead-up to the fourth season, when his storyline will probably take center stage. Or perhaps the dalliance between Lady Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) and the dashing visitor Lord Anderson (Daniel Francis) will be what curls your petticoats.

In any case, none of these people or their affairs have as much of a stranglehold over us as the longing for reconciliation between Pen and Eloise. That’s because Bridgerton, at its heart, has always shined most when it ceased being about romance and became about family and friendships. The show has always sparkled when the Bridgertons get together, showing off as a group, as only a large, robust family with hardly any actual problems can do. Penelope, by virtue of being a childhood friend and their next-door neighbor, has been an unofficial Bridgerton for so long that her estrangement from Eloise casts a shadow over all of them; through it, the whole show is, in a sense, broken.

And that’s as it should be. It feels entirely fitting that a show that clings so resolutely to its straight romance tropes should find its center in the fractured platonic love between two women. Allowing a female friendship to waltz away with its emotional core feels implicitly queer, however unintended, and undermines the entire project.

Of course, there are still another five episodes remaining — the season’s back half drops in June — so there’s plenty of time to unearth an actual queer relationship somewhere, anywhere, in Bridgerton’s famously race-blind universe. But given Bridgerton’s track record, any queer romance might be just as shallow as all the straight ones that have come before it.

Eloise and Pen, though? That’s a love story worth several more seasons.