‘Bridgerton’ Season Three, or why Cressida deserved better
A rant about the writing.
The third season of ‘Bridgerton’ (2020-) was…odd. A hurried eight episodes of flaccid romanticism that failed to focus on any one character for long enough to create an actual story, you’d be forgiven for not knowing who we’re meant to be following. I mean, take your pick!
Is it Penelope and Colin, the beautiful woman and her well-coiffed bridge troll on the poster?
Or maybe Franchesca and Lord Kilmartin, who spend the season quietly asserting themselves as a real couple, only for their future season’s plot to butt in at the last moment?
It could be Lady Danbury, her brother, and Lady Bridgerton, who spend the season dancing around a winter’s romance.
The answer is probably the first listed (again, see the hideously over-edited poster) but I have another answer. A slightly more outlandish one. Look to Eloise and her new friend, the Queen of Shoulders, the little debutante who couldn’t, Miss Cressida Cowper.
The role of Eloise within ‘Bridgerton’ is to basically offer a modern-adjacent perspective. She’s not totally up on the class issues of Georgian society, but she offers a (decidedly flaccid) feminist viewpoint the show can nod to and move past to celebrate the romances at the core. She spouts off a lot of dialogue about education, widening horizons, travel, “changing the world”, but without actually doing or saying anything meaningfully rebellious or interesting. Sometimes the verbiage is reflected in someone like Penelope, who gets at least a dozen monologues about how empowering her tabloid rag is, but that is always offset by the end result. A happy, heterosexual marriage with a male heir for the sake of the aristocratic line born in the end. Something her new friend wants, but is constantly denied.
Originally introduced as a rival to Daphne Bridgerton, Cressida is barely even an antagonist. In Season Three she’s a petty romantic rival or the season’s first half, only to then spends the second like a desperate animal in a trap. The show treats her as an obstacle that needs to be overcome, and she is thusly removed from the plot. Her arc is to be abandoned and thrown away. Eloise briefly reminisces on their friendship, but she was merely a distraction.
Similar to Marina Thompson, who also threatened the happiness of the main cast, only to be sent away in a carriage to a disappointing future.
We’re three seasons into Bridgerton, and the truth is, it remains pretty conservative. Yes, Benedict is of having bisexual threesomes with a hot widow, but he’s doing it as a bachelor. The expectation remains that he will likely follow his book counterpart and marry a woman. But one character seems to have actually internalised Eloise’s repetitive ramblings, and that is Cressida. In the final few episodes of Season Three, it’s she who repeats back at Eloise words of freedom and agency. In return, she’s ignored and ultimately shunned. Because nobody respects Cressida.
A huge part of the issue here is that Shonda Rimes has massively overstuffed this season. It has so much plot, with so many characters, that it just cannot handle the weight. The main couple feels like their best moments don’t get the chance to linger because the show has half a dozen important plots to keep track of. In an effort towards fan service, the show feels unfocused. Even Penelope’s sisters get their minor arc – a choice that only really offers the opportunity for jokes that are fun but also take up so much space in an already stuffed season. It really needed a few more episodes to allow tension to built up. Even Lady Featherington seems to have forgotten she was being investigated for fraud.
But then again, maybe she was distracted trying to keep up, because everyone gets an arc!
Violet Bridgerton needs a husband, so she isn’t shunted into the dower house.
Franchesca needs a husband and a future gay love interest.
Kate and Anthony are having a baby – so they’re off to India.
The Queen needs the opportunity to be in the show, with Lady Danbury.
There needs to be a Featherington heir.
Benedict needs to have group sex. Now.
It’s all too much. ‘Bridgerton’ has had two pretty solid seasons that managed to competently tell a story the current television standard of eight episodes. There was backstory and romance and comedy without everyone taking up so much space. It managed to allow the side characters to be alive.
Colin and Penelope have very little chemistry, which is unfortunate as at least Nicola Coughlan is radiant. The show historically has achieved sexual tension by building up a series of close but theoretically platonic situations, which climax in mid-season sex. In both previous cases, this is heightened by the antagonism between the characters. But while the latest couple technically fulfil this format (in the worst way – Colin literally says he was “ashamed of her”), their tension really doesn’t spike until post-wedding, and much of the early moments are more about Colin’s burgeoning feelings towards her. Colin is upset when he finds out, but it barely matters. Maybe more episodes would make it less…rushed. They get maybe an episode and a half to simmer - the meat of the tension is all Penelope, Eloise, and Cressida.
Which should mean the focus on Cressida, who has been heavily influenced by Eloise, would bring in some sort of reckoning. The show could have had it so Penelope is forced to grapple with her column as something that harms people outside of the family she is obsessed with. Or Eloise is forced to confront her own ideology actually being used practically, and how that goes against her own privileged upbringing. Or even have Cressida lose and still choose to leave on her own terms…which is what she was doing before she was suddenly the antagonist. But instead, the final moments she has in the show are sad and oddly mean-spirited.
It isn’t fair to judge a show on what it isn’t, so let’s actually state what this is: a tragedy. Eloise uses Cressida as petty companionship while she considers if she needs new friends outside of her family and Penelope, while Cressida is isolated and treated cruelly by her society parents, before she snaps and tries to grasp at enough funds for a life of independence. For this, they call her a monster. Explicitly.
When this plan doesn’t work out, because Penelope is allowed to take credit for her Georgian Page Six without consequences, while Cressida is sent away to live with a cartoonishly awful aunt who promises to remove the little warmth in her life.
The show is a fantasy. A romantic farce that has hit the same beats every season. YouTuber Julia Cudney has a great video about how this is reflected in the books, and another about fan response to season two! But the end result is, in a similar way to how Marina in season one needed to be shipped away to what definitely isn’t a love match, Cressida can’t have a happy ending. ‘Bridgerton’ is about the titular family. Everyone else can suffer. You’re not meant to see yourself in Cressida Cowper.
But some part of me can’t help but empathise with the girl in the show who did everything right and yet cannot catch a break. A character deliberately put into an awful situation and then punished for taking steps to remove herself for it. Earlier seasons easily slot her into an antagonist’s role, but the worst thing she does is try to escape. The show has rarely had a streak of meanness to it, but what it does have this season all focused on her.
I miss longer seasons of television. Shows that had space to build out narrative and character without having to sacrifice pacing. ‘Bridgerton’ is incredibly formulaic, but even it suffers without space to breathe. In an effort to cut out “filler”, we’ve lost the art of episodic storytelling. Instead, we speed from climax to climax. No foreplay.
Isn’t that right, Colin?