Simon and Daphne do occasionally pop up in later books, but they don’t really have storylines of their own. In fact, in The Viscount Who Loved Me, they only appear in one scene—a pivotal game of Pall Mall. It’s an important scene, but a single scene all the same.
In the show’s official announcement of Page’s departure, Lady Whistledown revealed that Daphne will “remain a devoted wife and sister, helping her brother navigate the upcoming social season.” That doesn’t sound to us like the Duke would have had much to do, or at least not much to do in terms of romance. And if the writers of the show tried to give Simon a bigger role in the one, very important scene he’s in, it might actually ruin a big, beloved part of the story.
That scene, in fact, is the one scene that Quinn said was most important to preserve on screen for the sake of the book fans.
“There’s a scene in the book where they’re playing Pall Mall which is like a precursor to croquet, and in the Bridgerton [family], Pall Mall is really a bloodsport,” she told E! News. “They’re very competitive. And I think it might be the most popular scene in any book that I’ve ever written—at least that I hear about from people, so that that was my thing. I was like, we have to have the Pall Mall. I’m pretty confident it will happen.”
