Every underdog has its day beneath the fops and frills
BRIDGERTON SEASON 3
Netflix
‘The lack of interest I’m feeling here today shall surely usher me into an early grave.” Thus begins the bored queen in another season of Bridgerton, which has been unkindly (if accurately) described as “the My Little Pony rewrite of Georgette Heyer”. One can only mirror her highness’s pursed-lipped impatience and think: sing it sister. How is this happening again? Bridgerton was a pandemic fad that gave us an endless parade of hunks in ruffles, bodies heaving in the haybarn, and pop hits played on string quartets at just the moment when our gin-addled senses were crying out for frothy stimulation.
It was a ratings behemoth and 80 million people reportedly streamed it. But as restrictions on modern life lifted and we weaned ourselves off the gin, interest in period porn, witless duchesses and preposterous wigs began to wane.
The radically dull season two was torn apart by critics, and it’s a mystery how a third one was commissioned. Which brings us back to the bored queen.
“I yearn for someone fresh, someone to turn this season on its head... apathy is a blight the monarchy simply cannot endure,” she says. And under her baleful glare, the taffeta of one Francesca Bridgerton rustles across the polished floor of the palace for yet another debutante inspection.
Before you wonder if they’ve just come up with another daughter for this outing, she was there (barely) in seasons one and two but played by another actress who got out while the going was good, and this time around Francesca is played by Hannah Dodd.
She’s a music-obsessed introvert who isn’t sure she’s up for being paraded about like a brooding mare. In this she is in quiet alliance with the wallflower of the balls, and the real star of the new season, Penelope Featherington, aka Lady Whistledown (Nicola Couglan), who continues to feel eternal spinsterhood breathing down her neck while speaking gentle truth to power through her gossip columnist alter ego.
Her pamphlet bulletins are, as always, gloriously toothless, consisting mainly of doubting if people know how they come across, or if someone stole a servant from someone else. Just as the residents of Gotham were unable to see past Clark Kent’s glasses, Lady Featherington’s lace fans and coy manners work wonders.
“The season has a way of coming between young ladies, pitting us against one another,” another character observes.
Lady F is still falling out with the one person who knows her real identity, Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie), but she finds an awkward friendship with Eloise’s brother Colin, who takes a break from having threesomes with chorus-line debutantes to help Lady F navigate the marriage mart.
But the tension of desire simmers between the two, even as the gossip queen herself is whispered about at the balls.
This is the strength of the new outing – that the “someone fresh” is the downtrodden wallflower and a journalist in petticoats to boot. Nicola Coughlan is a brilliant underdog in which hope and insecurity vie with decorum and is one of the show’s saviours, despite cringey lines such as “sometimes the most beautiful birds are the most common, one should not overlook the sparrow”.
The other chink of light might be Sam Phillips as Lord Debling, a Nordic-looking love interest who seems like a full meal compared to the insubstantial snacks that are the Bridgerton brothers.
Claudia Jessie also deftly handles the storyline of the pain of losing a close female friend – more painful, surely, than letting a suitor slip through your lace gloves.
And there’s a sense throughout that showrunner Shonda Rhimes has dialled back the more irritating excesses of the first two outings and the gimmicky musical interludes.
It might not win back all those who deserted Bridgerton during the forgettable second series, but, like the bored queen, I was, in the end, grudgingly impressed.