Fleabag (2016-2019)

I finally caught up with this award-winning and much-acclaimed British comedy series by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and found it completely and 100% enjoyable and impressive. It deserves the hoopla. Based on a one-woman theatrical show Waller-Bridge first did in 2013, it ran for two 6-episode seasons (of 25-minute episodes) in 2016 and 2019. Waller-Bridge wrote, stars, and breaks the fourth wall until it disappears, as if on aesthetic principle. At times it feels almost athletic—she can say volumes with fleeting facial expressions—and it's one of the best and most interesting points about the show, much more than a gimmick. Her character is credited as "Fleabag" but no one ever calls her by name, let alone that, so I'm not about to start. Waller-Bridge has said it's her family's nickname for her, so make it Phoebe. She thus exists as a kind of abstracted brooding human spirit, half-narrator hovering above the scenes—dissociative, in practical terms. At the corporeal level, this particular human spirit loves sex and cannot make emotional commitments. Yes, that urban story again. This one is set in London, where she operates a shoestring cafe. Phoebe is a bit like Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip—accompanied everywhere by irrational bouts of behavior that buzz in mad swirling patterns around her. She is like the eye of the hurricane but she is also the hurricane. No one knows exactly how, but they know it's her. They tell her to behave, knowing there's no point. Phoebe comes by her problems honestly enough. Her mother has been dead for some years. Her father (Bill Paterson) is a bumbling nebbish involved with her godmother (who is also her sister's godmother). This fairy godmother (Olivia Colman) is a narcissistic and commercially successful artist whose themes are sexual in various 1970s ways, and also one of the best characters on the show. Claire (Sian Clifford), Phoebe's sister, has coped by making herself a tormented overachiever, a success in her corporate work who has misplaced all her feelings along the way. "There she goes again" is the implicit refrain about Phoebe, and like classic I Love Lucy episodes a lot of this will necessarily be seen through your fingers, because you know the worst is coming and it's always surprising—Waller-Bridge is so good at writing these scenarios that all disasters can be discerned even when they are just specks on the horizon. Also your eyes will frequently pop—lot of activity around the eyeballs. It's hard to believe but too easy to believe the things these people say and do. Are they lovable and you forgive them anyway? That's the thing. They are not at all lovable and you can't really forgive some of it. But yes, I love them all, and every bit of this show.