Bridgerton review: Perhaps it’s foolish to ask for more but Nicola Coughlan deserves better – we all do

Penelope and Colin may be believable as friends but they don’t have the chemistry

Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton in season three of Bridgerton. Photo: Liam Daniel/Netflix

Chris Wasser

Death by hot air balloon? These things happen and, as Bridgerton’s third run shows us, they can happen to anyone. Do not fear, for there are no deaths in the first half of this extraordinarily uneventful season of television. But it’s fun to imagine — and a hot air balloon does, in fact, come remarkably close to flattening poor Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) in the second episode.

Were it not for the astonishing strength of young Colin Bridgerton (a hopeless Luke Newton) or the manly, shielding power of bearded bird watcher Lord Debling (a charisma-free Sam Phillips), our beloved Penelope would almost certainly have died an unmarried spinster. But she doesn’t. She lives to tell the tale, to write another gossip pamphlet under the guise of Lady Whistledown, and to fret and fuss over a vacuous charmer (Colin, obviously) too stupid to realise the truth: that Penelope will always be head over heels in love with him.