After a rather reasonable year-long wait (which still somehow felt both quick and too long), Sanditon returned for Season 3 on PBS Masterpiece on Sunday night. The Regency romance got right to work diving into the aftermath of Charlotte’s big decision in the Season 2 ending, and showed that it’s going to be a difficult road for the newly engaged lady and her hometown fiancé, Ralph Starling. It turns out, though, that the series almost went with a very different love interest for Ms. Heywood in the third season, but they absolutely made the right choice with Farmer Ralph.
Who Was Almost Charlotte’s Sanditon Season 3 Love Interest?
In case you still need to remember what happened at the end of Season 2, know that after they’d finally realized they were hot for each other, Charlotte and her boss, Alexander Colbourne, went back to muting their feelings and engaging in disastrous miscommunication. Good ol’ Alex got in his feels over his part in his wife’s death, decided he wasn’t good enough for CharChar, and fired her, which led to her heading back home, giving up on love, and accepting Ralph’s proposal.
But, showrunner Justin Young recently revealed to Decider that her new love interest wasn’t always such a decent, but relatively boring, young man. When asked if Ralph was always their pick for the person she’d console herself with, he said a new character to Season 3 was the choice for a while:
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. I think the audience would have been frustrated if it had been another love triangle. 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. What Ralph represents is obligation to her family duty, a decent guy. It’s the good guy who is sweet, but it’s not quite worthy.
Wow. OK, I have to say, they were absolutely correct in their assumption that they had to handle Charlotte’s love life very differently in Season 3, and I’m glad they didn’t go with their first pick for several reasons.
First off, as he said, we’ve already had two seasons with her being in the middle of love triangles, of a sort. In Season 1, it was clear that Charlotte and Sidney were doing an enemies-to-lovers thing, but she and Young Stringer (played by Vikings: Valhalla star Leo Suter) also had heaps of chemistry, and he was clearly sweet on her. The second season saw her also engage in a burgeoning ETL romance with Alex, while also entertaining the (eventually very bad news) attentions of Colonel Lennox (Tom Weston-Jones). No one wanted to see another triangle where the audience could (for a time at least) root for her to choose either man.
Secondly, while what we’ve seen of Samuel so far makes him seem like a good, fun character that we’ll enjoy spending time with, would he have been Alex’s brother and Charlotte’s new love interest? The complete last thing anyone would have wanted is for her to potentially be in a situation where she divides a family because she allows one brother’s stupidity in love to push her into the arms of his less emotionally burdened sibling. Ick!
Lastly, it just makes good sense that Charlotte would have abandoned Sanditon after Alexander Colbourne’s upsetting finale decision, return to her hometown and accept Ralph’s proposal. He is, after all, the man she ran off to Sanditon because of in the first place, because she wasn’t ready to get married yet. Basically, Young and his team did the right thing by changing course, and I can’t wait to see how Char and Alex find their way back to one another (even though I know it’ll destroy Farmer Ralph)!
