A Plus Size Girl’s Review Of Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1
Dearest gentle reader, BRIDGERTON SEASON 3 PART 1 REVIEW LESSGO!
Ideally, I would’ve wanted to do a combined Part 1 & 2 review but there’s a lot to unpack so here we are.
Season 3 is POLIN SEASON! Not pollen allergies, but POLIN as in Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton)! The latest season of the Netflix series is based on Book 4, Romancing Mister Bridgerton, of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books series.
After getting enemies-to-lovers last season, we are getting friends-to-lovers.
In Bridgerton Season 3, Colin Bridgerton will realise that the love and intimacy he travelled around the world to seek was always to be found right across the street in the arms of his “very good friend,” Pen.
And Penelope, our Lady Whistledown, ever the wallflower, is finally going to step out of the shadows, stop letting her Mamma dress her in childish citrusy colours, get a makeover, and tap into some of that self-love for some confidence. See that’s like a magic potion for us plus-size girlies with body image issues from years of being perceived as just our weight and not our sparkling personalities.
Pen is a fantastic writer and a voracious reader. She’s funny, has a thinking mind, and loves society. My girl deserves the world. So her getting out of the friendzone is a huge win for all of us plus-size girlies because… well… haha… that rarely happens.
This season we also get Kate and Anthony in marital bliss, although it’s crumbs, dearest gentle reader, mere crumbs. But you know what? I’ll take it because Kanthony, bless them, is my Bridgerton love story gold standard (Only after Violet and Edmund though, the OG). The yearning, Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony when he finds out Kate’s alive and awake and the way we got ‘bane of my existence and object of all my desires’, Kate’s ‘elder daughter of an Indian household’ baggage, and Simone Ashley’s expressions… the music with Wrecking Ball! Season 2 WAS EVERYTHING to me. That’s what every future season will be compared to.
So does Polin Season match up?
I had a lot of expectations TBH, because as a writer, reader, plus-size girlie who had to learn to love herself so she could gain the confidence to let her personality shine, and who often gets sidestepped by her crushes for her hotter friends, I relate the most to Penelope Featherington. And Nicola Coughlan who plays Penelope, has met each of my expectations!
Her makeover is delightful! I love her outfits this season, the colour palette is more mature and jewel-toned, the way she wears her hair down that frames her face so well (again, a plus size girl thing), and her sensuous makeup! She makes you (and Colin) sit up and take notice. It’s all perfect.
Nicola effectively brings out the nervousness of Pen finally stepping into the light and making an effort to be noticed, the resolve she has to find a husband to get away from her family and all the shaming and trolling she endures. There’s a nighttime scene, lamps lit, fire burning, and passion churning, when she asks Colin for a teensy favour. Nicola infuses the scene with such palpable desperation, fear, and longing. She’s fantastic and has carried the entire season so far.
But Colin Bridgerton… sigh… is severely underwritten, for a male lead.
Look here, Bridgerton is a Regency Era romance. They can fumble the outfits and they can fumble the historical context. But the one thing that must get bang on is THE YEARNING.
In the past, we’ve got male leads like Simon and Anthony, whose layered back stories of childhood abuse and emotional baggage added such depth to their characters. So that when they played men in love, all of this was distilled into their yearning for The One who’d come like the answer to all their unspoken questions and rakishness.
This season would be interesting because the two leads are characters we’ve seen on the show since Season 1. While Pen gets to do the heavy lifting in terms of an arc, the writing for Colin feels so light and threadbare! It’s like most of his character development happened off-screen while he was travelling. We merely get a few lines from his diary about how empty he feels, a few scenes of him sleepless, restless, and thinking of Pen, and then some longing glances at her when she’s with another man. These two have been childhood besties, there has to be more to this. Shouldn’t the yearning be more defined, more potent?
In a scene between Colin and his mother, Violet, which should’ve been an emotional eye-opener for him, she tells him that he is the most sensitive of her children who thinks about others before himself. But we never see that side of him. Didn’t she say the same thing about Anthony and his sense of duty? Who is Colin Bridgerton apart from Penelope’s best friend and a freshly minted hottie? His lack of a sense of purpose (which BTW is why he keeps travelling everywhere) and why his friendship with Pen makes him find it isn’t brought out well.
Luke Newton gets the Bridgerton glow-up and he steps into the limelight. But the writing doesn’t give him a fighting chance to transform into the romantic Bridgerton male lead we could sigh over. At least not until the last 15 minutes of the episode, when a certain carriage scene happens! This is where Luke truly blossoms into the Colin we deserve. The scene is my favourite in Part 1, and I hope we get more of this in Part 2.
Apart from Francesca Bridgerton making her society debut this season, which was cute and everything, and Benedict’s constantly delightful funniness, there were a bunch of subplots this season that I couldn’t bring myself to care about, again because they felt frivolous and distracting. Like the one with the Mondrich family (the boxer and his wife) coming into a title, becoming new members of Mayfair society, and the struggles that come with its many rules of decency and class. There’s also a strange gentleman in town with eyes for our beloved Bridgerton matriarch Violet, and he has a history with Lady Danbury. But again, not much there yet to get me to care.
However, I am seated for the friendship between Pen’s ex-bestie Eloise Bridgerton and the ton’s resident Mean Girl, Cressida Cowper! Cressida, if you remember, debuted with Daphne and Penelope. And this friendship gives us a nice peek behind her avant-garde fashion and cruel behaviour into the girl who, I shall remind you, is on her third season in the marriage mart, still without a husband.
Being friends with Eloise, a feminist, is quite illuminating for Cressida and us. Through them, the writers tackle themes like pick-me behaviour in women and how the patriarchy pits young girls against each other. Also how it forces men to suppress emotions and participate in the ‘alpha male’ charade, like Colin, who acts like a total Casanova with all the female attention he gets because that’s what he sees young men his age think to be cool.
There’s also Lord Debling, the other prospect for Penelope, whose attention makes Colin super J. He’s an interesting character, not just some rich Lord, passionate about his hobbies and work, well-read and travelled, and unlike Colin, he treats Pen so right. If this were real life, Pen would marry him because, even if he can’t give her the passionate love she wants, he does see her as she is and likes her for her personality.
And this brings us to my peeve with Bridgerton Season 3.
I know that Bridgerton is fictional and fantastical. It’s set in the Regency Era with no racism, so yeah, we know, the unbelievable happens here. But I feel like the season could’ve done a better job of writing the struggles of Penelope being a plus-size girl. The showrunners and Nicola Coughlan (who BTW isn’t plus size) have said they’ve chosen not to focus on this aspect because Season 3 isn’t about Penelope’s body. They want to set positive standards of representation for all body types. This is great. This season you will also see a debutante converse with her mother in ASL (sign language), Penelope talking to a young Lord in a wheelchair, and another debutante who is also a plus-size girl.
But no matter how much you tiptoe around this, it doesn’t change that Penelope’s weight did factor in her being a wallflower, creating Whistledown as an outlet for her defiance, not having the confidence to approach men or stand up to her family, and in Colin and other men not looking at her twice. As a plus-size girlie who has had the exact experience as Penelope, it felt like an erasure of the truth of sorts.
More so because in the books, Pen loses 13 kgs, and then after a couple of years, Colin falls for her. Book loyalists would love to deny that Pen’s weight loss transformation had anything to do with her finally getting Colin’s attention. And maybe in the books, which I haven’t read, that’s true. But erm, is it though for the show?
I am not saying that plus-size girls don’t get loved, or get in relationships and find someone who loves them. Pen did meet Lord Debling. I’d like to believe there are Deblings for most of us. And Colins for some of us. I’ve seen it.
But this is also a story of a plus-sized girl who had a crush on a guy friend, who told her she was awesome but never looked at her as a love interest and denied that he’d ever consider her as one, and ignored her to date her pretty cousin sister (Marina Thompson). He didn’t take notice of her till she made the effort to look “conventionally pretty.” In the show, we’ve seen girls with the blandest personalities, the shyest of girls, even Pen’s silly, dimwitted sisters, find husbands. But not Penelope. Choosing to not ‘make it about her weight’ doesn’t make that go away.
With Season 1 having so many barbs about Penelope’s weight, I did feel like Season 3, her season, should’ve addressed this better, sensitively of course, instead of subtly sidestepping it.
There’s a scene where Penelope’s makeover doesn’t exactly have the desired effect, and she tells Colin that being good-looking and rich is better than being a spinster because it opens a world of possibilities to him that she still doesn’t have. And I wanted more on that. But I was left unsatisfied with how suddenly and without deeper nuance their love story developed.
I believe a lot of this season, including the subplots, feels rather thin and rushed, to give a wider berth to Part 2 dealing with the repercussions of Penelope being Lady Whistledown on her relationship with Colin.
So now, I wait impatiently for Part 2 to see if any of these concerns get addressed, we finally get that Lady Danbury connection to Polin from the book, and oooh if we get more Kate-Anthony mushiness! Somebody get me a spin-off of Kanthony honeymooning in India!
What did you think of Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1? It is currently streaming on Netflix.
PS: Yes, yes, Banita Sandhu popped up this season as Miss Malhotra, and I am glad no funny accent. I wanted more of her in the show and Netflix India promotions. Alas.
PPS: I will do a full review that includes the music review once Part 2 drops!
