Bridgerton: Why Lady Whistledown's Scandal Papers Are So Popular - Screen Rant

Netflix's excellent new Regency-era drama, Bridgerton, may look like a Pride & Prejudice clone, but the show's taste for scandal makes it more like Shonda Rhimes' other shows, Grey's Anatomy and Scandal. And this new arm of the Shondaland universe takes its commitment to scandal so seriously that it has a mysterious figure at its heart keeping everyone in check by revealing their secrets very publicly. These pre-cursor tabloid releases are phenomenally popular and become even more powerful as a result.

Despite being steeped in traditional tropes, Bridgerton avoids being cliched by adding modern touches like covers of songs like Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish and more progressive ideas, particularly in terms of feminism. It also adopts a position owing something to Gossip Girl and also acting as a, perhaps unintentional, commentary on cancel culture. In fact, Lady Whistledown's revelations operate in a similar way, with a growing disdain for them by the end of the season as Queen Charlotte feels snubbed and attempts to shut the scandal papers down. But Whistledown isn't exactly a toxic element, she's merely a call for accountability when supposedly respectable society is riddled with hypocrisy.

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So why are the papers so popular if they could potentially bring shame to anyone in the ton? Seemingly anyone can be a target, after all. Well, in a world where everyone has some sort of scandal attached to them, everyone wants to see what everyone else is up to, in order to make themselves feel better. There's also the element of fear of course, as those reading no doubt do so because their "guilt" makes them fear their own names appearing next to something salacious and ruinous. But it's the point about duplicitousness and just how many people are living double lives that really makes Whistledown's papers so popular and it's partly a reflection of Bridgerton's comments on the Regency era's changing times and the hypocrisy attached to the pretense of supposed moral "decency."

The ton at the center of the story of Bridgerton has two societies: the culture of society balls, debutante events, and old fashioned traditions everyone feels duty-bound to appear at no matter what their personal feelings and the supposed sub-culture or artists and individualist progressives. In several cases, characters from the former seek a way to find their place in the second, which generally means adopting a fake identity - just as Lady Whistledown does - to fit in. A mask of sorts. Anthony Bridgerton wears a mask of indifference to hide that he's ignoring his "duty" as Lord of his household due to his love of Siena for instance, and his brother Benedict discovers the world of debauchery and free expression around Henry Granville's artistic commune. Even Lord Featherington has his excesses to express his rage against the machine of society, but his backfires catastrophically. In this sort of environment, the sub-culture is always perilously close to the surface and the scandal papers are a sort of conduit for that.

Lady Whistledown is actually the villain of the piece in that respect: while she protects or elevates some characters - as she does with Daphne predominantly - she also stops the free expression of the ton because they fear her repercussions. She's not so much challenging the status quo (by stopping immorality), she's actually reinforcing the traditional model through fear, which is why her scandal papers are such a huge part of the society. It is a world on the edge of change and Whistledown is arguably holding Bridgerton's moral progressives - even those simply seeking the freedom to express their sexual identity - back in a system that makes them unhappy. And her papers are an awfully compelling tool of suppression.

Next: Bridgerton: Why The Queen Is Obsessed With The King's Death