Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Fleabag opens with one woman’s breathless monologue to camera. “You know that feeling when a guy you like sends you a text at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday night asking if he can come and find you? And then you open the door for him like you’ve forgot he’s coming over?” She turns from the camera and shifts into presentation mode. She’s chill, casual, sexy, and acting as though she forgot the handsome man she’s letting in at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday night was coming over. Soon, we watch them have sex and we see her reluctantly let him in the so-called backdoor. She thinks it’s no big deal in the moment, but in the morning, he reveals no one’s ever let him have anal sex before.
This is Fleabag. It’s as heart-wrenching as it is breezy, naughty as it is clever, and it’s the brainchild of star, writer, and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Fleabag is Amazon’s latest original comedy and at its basest description is what Girls might look like if it had the polish and audacity of something like Peep Show. It’s an unflinching look at a confused young woman trying to navigate the rough waters of love, family, money, sex, and self-respect in the modern world. Waller-Bridge plays “Fleabag,” a deliciously cheeky heroine with no concern for the fourth wall. Every thought, mistake, and bit of whimsy on her mind is presented for our consumption in incessant to-camera confessions. The bulk of the humor of the piece comes from that glorious gulf between what our inner selves feel and what we project to those around us. Keeping up appearances comes with a lot of lying to ourselves about who we really are.
Much of the drama also comes from moments when truth crashes the party. You get the sense that Fleabag isn’t the only one keeping up a porcelain-thin facade. Whether her best friend is slipping up and giving her real opinion on her clothes or her stepmother (played with a heaping dose of smiling vitriol by the smashing Olivia Colman) is subtly revealing the depths of her jealousy, Fleabag’s interactions with others are marked by her inability to see that everyone else might be struggling, too. There’s a fascinating sibling relationship with between Fleabag and her “perfect” sister that seems on the surface to be a classic example of sister-on-sister competition. The irony is they both want to impress each other and be loved by one another.
Fleabag is also a show about modern relationships. We discover early on that Fleabag and her ex-boyfriend broke up because he caught her masturbating to President Obama giving a speech…while he was in bed next to her. He storms off and tells her that she can’t show up drunk anymore to fix things. By the end of the episode, she shows up at his door drunk again. She’s caught in a loop of doomed connections. This ripples out into other encounters with men who either catch her fancy because of their looks or their willingness.
Instead of merely being about the shocking things men and women do to connect with one another, Fleabag is a spectacularly ruthless comedy that offers something more. Waller-Bridge’s aim is to peel back the masks that we all wear and expose us for the all-too human beings we are underneath. We are gross, sad, funny, glorious, fragile things…and we’re all kind of “fleabaggy.”
