This article contains spoilers for the Bridgerton season 4 finale.
Get ready, dearest gentle reader! There’s a new Lady Whistledown in town — and no one is safe from their scrutiny.
The fourth season of Bridgerton ended on a cliffhanger with the reveal that a new individual has taken up Lady Whistledown’s quill after Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) announced that she’d be stepping down from her role as the ton’s most prominent gossipmonger.
Series showrunner and producer Jess Brownell tells Entertainment Weekly that it was always part of the plan to introduce a new Whistledown in season 4.
Netflix
“Shonda [Rhimes] and I had a conversation towards the end of season 3 where we talked about what would happen with Whistledown after Penelope comes forward,” she says. “And we knew that we weren’t going to get multiple seasons out of her being a public Whistledown, because it’s lost a bit of its stakes now that the whole world knows who she is.”
It also created the perfect opportunity for Brownell and Rhimes to inject a little bit of mystery into the series — especially since no one has ever seriously taken over the mantle of Whistledown from Penelope in Julia Quinn’s novels.
“We thought, what better way to get to create a genuine mystery with Whistledown than to have someone new take it over?” Brownell adds. “So Shonda and I have an idea about who Whistledown is and that’s what we’re writing toward.”
And apologies, dearest gentle reader, but she’s not revealing their identity anytime soon. “We’ll definitely be planting some clues over the next few seasons for people to hopefully have their own guesses,” Brownell teases.
She adds, “I’ll say it won’t be revealed in season 5. I can say that we’ve already finished writing season 5, so beyond that, I can’t say for sure, but we will play with the mystery for a little while.”
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Brownell can share, however, that the arrival of a new Whistledown will put everyone in the ton on edge. “Now everyone’s on their toes,” she says.
Netflix
It’s also clear that this version of Whistledown already has a very different manner with which they carry themselves.
“If you notice the voice of the new Whistledown, it’s still Julie Andrews, but it has a slightly different tone,” Brownell points out. “Julie gave us a great performance with just altering her voice just a little bit. And that’s a little bit of a hint of the way the new Whistledown is gonna be a little bit different from Penelope’s version of Whistledown.”
We’ll have to wait and see just how else they differ when Bridgerton returns for its already-greenlit fifth season in the future.