“Fleabag” begins with a woman who has nothing left to lose and a camera she will not stop talking to. Phoebe Waller-Bridge created the series, wrote it, and plays the title character, a dry-witted, sexual, angry, porn-watching, grief-riddled woman trying to make sense of the world. It premiered on BBC Three on 21 July 2016. It ran for two seasons and 12 episodes, ending on 8 April 2019. It is a comedy, and it is a drama, and it never lets you decide which one you are watching. It scores 8.8 out of 10.
Trailer, via Prime Video.
A Woman Who Talks to the Camera
The mechanic is the whole show. Fleabag breaks the fourth wall constantly. She gives exposition, internal monologue and running commentary straight down the lens. The people around her never notice. That gap is where the series lives. She can say the true thing to us and the polite thing to them, and we watch both at once. It should be a gimmick. It is not, because Waller-Bridge plays the difference between the two faces as the actual subject. The camera is not a joke. It is the only relationship she can sustain.
A One-Woman Show From Edinburgh
The series is based on Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show, first performed in 2013 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. You can feel that origin in the writing. Fleabag talks like a person who has had to hold a room alone. The lines are short and they land hard. Two Brothers Pictures produced the series for the digital channel BBC Three, in a co-production agreement with Amazon Studios. That arrangement matters to how the show exists. It is a British series with American money behind it, and it kept the small, mean, specific texture of a stage monologue.
Claire, and the Sister Who Sees Through Her
Sian Clifford co-stars as Claire, Fleabag’s sister. Claire is the counterweight. She is not a fool and she is not a villain. She is the person who knows Fleabag best and likes her least, which is a harder part to write than any of the men. Most of the main characters are unnamed, including Waller-Bridge’s and Clifford’s. That choice is doing work. Fleabag is not a name, it is a condition. Claire is not a name either. They are roles inside a family, and the show refuses to pretend otherwise.
The Priest Arrives
Andrew Scott joins in the second series as The Priest. He is the best thing the show ever did, and he arrives late. The second series is where “Fleabag” stops being a very good comedy about a mess and becomes something with a spine. Scott plays a man who is warm, funny and genuinely unavailable, and the show does not cheat the unavailability. The fourth-wall device does new work here too, because the audience’s relationship to Fleabag has to carry more weight once the show slows down and asks for something. That is the smartest move the series makes.
A portrait into the mind of a dry-witted, sexual, angry, porn-watching, grief-riddled woman, trying to make sense of the world.
London, Late Nights, Bright Lights
The setting is contemporary London. The synopsis promises frenetic energy, late nights and bright lights, and the show delivers them as pressure rather than glamour. Fleabag hurls herself headlong at modern living and gets thrown roughly up against the walls of it. The city is not a character. It is a set of surfaces she keeps bouncing off. Grief is the engine underneath all of it, and the show is honest about how grief makes people cruel and funny and unbearable in the same hour.
Why the Writing Holds Up
Waller-Bridge won the British Academy Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance for the first series. The second series earned her Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. Clifford, Olivia Colman and guest stars picked up acting nominations. The awards are not the argument, but they track the argument. This is writing that gets funnier the more precisely it is built. The show is 12 episodes and it never pads. That restraint is rare.
What Actually Matters Here
Critics and viewers have called “Fleabag” one of the greatest comedy series of all time and one of the greatest television series of all time. That is a large claim and the show mostly earns it. The first series is looser and more sketch-like. The second series is the one that will last.
What matters is not the fourth wall, which other shows have used, or the sex, which is frank but not the point. What matters is that the show found a way to dramatize the private commentary everyone runs while pretending to be fine, and made that commentary feel like a life rather than a bit.
The weakness is real too. The first series leans on shock and on the audience’s affection for Waller-Bridge, and a few of the supporting men are thinner than the writing around them deserves. The show also gets credit for honesty it sometimes buys cheaply, because a confessional voice can excuse a lot of structure. But the second series fixes most of this, and the Priest storyline gives the whole thing a cost. “Fleabag” is not a perfect series. It is a series that knew exactly when to stop, and that is close to the same thing.
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