Fleabag: Hilarious, Touching, & True

Amazon Studios

Where would we be without the BBC and Amazon? I just finished watching the six-episode season of Fleabag, and I can't even wait to process all my emotions. I simply had to take to the blog to tell everyone to watch it immediately.

Written by and starring the incomparable Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag is the story of a single woman in London and her approach to sex, work, and family. It is only now, when I am writing this review, that I have realized we never learn her name (she is simply the eponymous "Fleabag"). Phoebe Waller-Bridge spends a lot of time making direct asides to the camera, offering up the most expressive faces ever and delivering an internal monologue to the audience as her life happens to her, and you feel so in tune with her thoughts and emotions that knowing her name is not remotely important. What is important, however, is meeting the various characters who come in and out of her life, and slowly piecing together the back story of this incredibly hilarious but ultimately sad woman.

Fleabag is a comedy. But like all comedies in the current Golden Age of TV, there is an undercurrent of drama and I would be remiss if I said this show will only make you laugh throughout its six-episode run. While the first three episodes feature spectacularly raunchy R-rated comedy and sarcastic, brilliant jokes, something happens towards the end of the fourth episode that made me realize this show wasn't just interested in making me laugh. It was definitely going to make me cry. Hugh Dennis delivers a warm and heartbreaking monologue set to an incredible piece of music and that's when you discover this show has wormed its way into your heart.

Apart from Waller-Bridge's captivating central performance, Sian Clifford is blisteringly good as her Type A sister, Claire; Bill Paterson is remarkable as their father, who manages to be both hands-off and a bewilderingly awkward worry wart; and Olivia Colman is the most gleefully evil stepmother portrayed on screen since Cinderella. The show is adapted from Waller-Bridge's one-woman play from the Edinburgh Fringe, and she manages to tell this story in six perfect episodes that manage to simultaneously wreck you and build you back up. It has been a mere two hours since I finished the last episode, and I am already keen to go back and re-watch my favorite scenes, both comedic and dramatic. Much like You're the Worst, Fleabag is a miraculous show that understands real life is not easily compartmentalized into comedy or drama; while it packs in humor, it is not afraid to allow grief and sadness to enter the fray. I love, love, love this show, and I'm willing to bet that you will too.