‘Sanditon’ Showrunner Justin Young Explains Why Charlotte’s Fiancée is Such a Dud

Sanditon Season 3 opens with heroine Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) returning to the titular seaside resort with her fiancé Ralph Starling (Cai Bridgen). However, this engagement is not a cause for celebration. Everyone knows that Charlotte is actually in love with her former employer, Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes). And everyone knows that Mr. Colbourne is madly in love with Charlotte. Everyone knows that Charlotte and Mr. Colbourne are meant to be together except, it seems, Charlotte and Colbourne.

After Colbourne awkwardly tried to express his feelings in Sanditon Season 2, Charlotte thought he was firing her, causing her to quit her job as his governess and acquiesce to boring farmer boy Ralph’s marriage proposal. So now fans of the Masterpiece on PBS show have to deal with watching our beloved Charlotte hanging around with Ralph, who is a total drip, and not her one true love.

What makes things worse is that Ralph is the definition of a bore. He’s cute enough, nice enough, but not smart or dashing or witty enough. He hardly knows any poetry compared to Charlotte’s intense knowledge of contemporary writers like Coleridge and Keats. Ralph also does this awful thing where he projects his own insecurities onto Charlotte, saying that both of them don’t fit in with the tony folks of Sanditon. Worst of all, he seems to be actually in love with Charlotte, while she is simply fond of him.

Of course Ralph exists to hinder Charlotte’s chance at a happily ever after with Mr. Colbourne, but is there a reason he has to be such a dud? Did the producers of Sanditon ever consider giving Charlotte’s latest love interest a bit more spice?

“Yes, funnily enough,” Sanditon showrunner Justin Young told Decider during a recent chat. “The experience of doing [Seasons 2 and 3] simultaneously was so intense and so frenetic. I mean, it was an unbelievable amount of story to generate in a very quick space of time. And in the lead up to getting that green light, we pitched a number of different versions to Masterpiece before we landed on one that they liked and we liked.”

So who was going to be Charlotte’s other Season 3 love interest? “Samuel, the character who is Colbourne’s brother. He was actually in embryo. He was going to be Charlotte’s alternate love interest. And we’d imagined a much more kind of foppish Hugh Grant-y kind of love interest for Charlotte.”

Masterpiece nixed this foppish gentleman because according to Young, they are “very, very clear about what their audience likes.” The Masterpiece audience is one that knows the Regency romance genre inside and out.

“I think the audience would have been frustrated if it had been another love triangle,” Young explained. “Because we still had, you know, we’d established Sidney as a man that she loved in [Season 1]. We’d established Colbourne as a man that she loved in [Season 2]. So I think to bring in a third man that she actually had strong romantic feelings for would have made her look fickle.”

Masterpiece embraced the idea of Ralph being a lamer love interest because they wanted more of a “Bellamy” or “Baxter.” A perfectly fine suitor who has no real chance stealing the heroine’s heart.

“What Ralph represents is obligation to her family duty, a decent guy,” Young said. “It’s the good guy who is sweet, but it’s not quite worthy.”

Does that imply that Colbourne will be found worthy of Charlotte by season’s end? Fans will have to stream all six episodes of Sanditon Season 3 on PBS Passport or wait for new episodes to premiere weekly on Masterpiece on PBS.