When Gossip Girl unveiled its titular town tattle nearly a decade ago, fans rioted. Dan Humphrey made no sense. There were inconsistencies in his character, he was lame, and the whole reveal felt anticlimactic. Even Penn Badgley himself was against the reveal.
But this twist had one thing going for it: Gossip Girl waited until the bitter end. The show had patience. Bridgerton, Netflix’s Regency era version of the scandalous tale, has none, and chose to reveal its key character far too early in the series.
Bridgerton has burdened its very own Gossip Girl, Penelope Featherington, aka Lady Whistledown, by making her both annoying and manipulative. And yet, we’re expected to deal with her in the spotlight of the show for the next (at least) two seasons while she waits for a sweeping love story of her own. On top of that, Penelope’s character is given all of the very worst storylines—no one cares about the Featheringtons, or, for that matter, her unrequited crush, Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), the most boring of the Bridgerton brothers.
Her strongest asset is that she’s an underdog. No one would suspect young Penelope—in actuality, the actress who plays Penelope, Nicola Coughlan, is 35, a far stretch from 18—who is polite, reserved, shy, to be capable of such salacious gossip-mongering. But she’s not. As soon as we know she’s whining about her closest allies in a column spread all over town, we know that Penelope is far from the innocent lady we’re meant to believe she is.
Since we know she’s Lady Whistledown, none of Bridgerton Season 2 makes Penelope look good. For starters, her family faces massive debt and scandal in the Ton. Completely underwater, Lady Featherington forces her eldest daughter into a marriage with her cousin. Penniless, maligned in town, and her sister forcing an incestuous marriage, what does Penelope do?
Nothing. She hides her coin from pamphlet sales under the floorboards and says nothing.
Perhaps this would not be such an issue if we did not know Penelope was Whistledown, or if she gave some reason for wanting to pen the gossip column. There would be some purpose behind this gossip column if she were to, say, save her family’s name. Or her best friend. Instead, she backhandedly gives some more business to the Ton’s tailor.
The one draw Penelope should have is her slow-burn romance with Colin Bridgerton. The pair have a friends-to-lovers arc going on, but their chemistry isn’t even remotely close to the When Harry Met Sally dynamic it should be. On top of Colin’s character being an overall snooze—seriously, little Hyacinth and Gregory are more fascinating than this oddly bearded man—he and Pen don’t even seem like good friends. They have no intimacy. Her crush is boring. Compared to the burning passion between Simon (Regé-Jean Page) and Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) in Season 1, or Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate (Simone Ashley) in these new episodes, Colin and Penelope are a real drag.
Another key relationship in defining Penelope’s reception is her friendship with Eloise (Claudia Jessie), which, after Season 2, seems completely soiled. Pen attempts to excuse her destructive behavior by gaslighting Eloise into thinking that an exposé is exactly what she needed to stay safe from the Queen. No, Penelope: she’d be free from all scandal if you weren’t writing this column at all. Without the spunky Eloise to liven her up, Penelope is nothing but a brat with a gossip rag.
The problem is not Nicola Coughlan. Even though she’s acting way out of her age range, she still plays the schemer with impressive conviction. It’s just hard to tell if this characterization—evil, devious, two-faced—is what Bridgerton wants us to think of Penelope, who will, eventually, become the leading lady of the show.
Whereas the Gossip Girl reboot had a solid reason for revealing its secret sleuth in the first season, with Bridgerton, the logic feels flawed. Even though Season 2 features a subplot in which the Queen obsessively attempts to unmask Whistledown, it never really felt like Pen was in danger of being exposed.
Penelope was a fine character in Season 1, but after wrecking her relationship with Eloise (All to, what, keep hold of the pamphlet that’s ruining her life?) and continuing to be cruel to the Ton, she’s become the villain. That doesn’t seem like the role Penelope was born to play.
The season finale worked extra hard to try and make viewers feel bad for Pen, who ends up heartbroken after overhearing Colin disparage her and in tears after Eloise essentially ends their friendship. But by that point it was so hard to justify her actions that these rejections seem more mean-spirited than character-saving.
So, where does this leave us for the rest of Bridgerton? Season 3 is meant to home in on Benedict, who is far more fascinating than his younger brother. Still, there is speculation that the series could stray from the books’ order and go right into Colin’s love story (which, without spoiling anything, heavily features Penelope). But doubling down on Penelope storylines with Lady Whistledown and a romance storyline, at this point in the series, seems like a stretch.
Anthony was a bit of a bore in Season 1, but he really upped his game in Season 2—which is to say that there’s hope for Colin and Penelope to grow in episodes to come. There’s got to be a stronger reason for Penelope to be Whistledown, and in turn, for us to know that she’s Whistledown.
Penelope’s biggest hope? Colin. Perhaps there is a way for Bridgerton to make Penelope’s unrequited love feel boundless enough to wreak such havoc on the Ton. But this pair will need at least an ounce of chemistry before that’ll work. Time to spark things up.
