Hello, Schlubs! For those of you not in the know, this March we held Schlub Madness, where readers voted on the first TV series I’d cover for the newsletter. The winner was Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s excellent Amazon Prime series. We’ll only be covering season one (sorry Hot Priest fans), and this essay will cover the first half of the season. Thanks to everyone who voted, and I hope you enjoy!
Right from the start, it’s about sex. In the series' opening scene, Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a young woman living in London, waits at her apartment door for her booty call to arrive. Shifting from one foot to another, she anxiously monologues her pre-hook-up routine to the camera. “You know that feeling when…” she begins, describing the relatable scenario of getting a text from a guy at two in the morning. However, there’s something off about this ordinary tryst. The camera’s shaking and Fleabag’s breathing immediately gives it the feeling of The Blair Witch Project. And once the man arrives — the hook-up becomes darkly comedic, focusing on accidental anal sex and concerns about Fleabag’s anal circumference.
Based on Waller-Bridge’s award-winning one-woman play, Fleabag follows a young woman only given the moniker of “Fleabag” as she self-sabotages her way through sexploits, family, and grief. The London she inhabits seems similar to ours — just a bit cruder. Fleabag reads a newspaper column on the bus one morning titled “Has the Word Feminism Become Dirty?” Below that, an advertisement shows a nude woman fingering herself. Above her, the question “Thinking of Getting A Mortgage?” is laid out in bold text.
The characters of Fleabag also reflect this crass reality, where the walls between subtlety and perversion have begun to crumble. The previously mentioned hook-up, cheekily referred to as Arsehole Guy (Ben Aldridge), can only form a loving relationship after he and Fleabag have had anal sex. Harry (Hugh Skinner), Fleabag’s on-and-off again boyfriend, is so rattled by the world’s focus on sex that he’s been reduced to a prudish stereotype of the nagging housewife. It’s not just the men either — Fleabag’s artist godmother/stepmother (the hilarious Olivia Colman) waxes poetic about the meaning of her penis and boob sculptures, but her self-portrait is an unexplained and horrific black hole. Of course, like in any good British comedy, any deviation from or recognition of these problematic norms is frowned upon.
Enter, Fleabag.
In Fleabag: The Scriptures, Phoebe Waller-Bridge explains the character’s origin, “I read an article once that said that a woman’s prime was at age twenty-five, because that is when she was considered at her most sexually attractive… We were becoming numbed by it [porn], and I was teetering on the edge of a depression. From there I looked down into the abyss and at the bottom of it was Fleabag looking up at me, in lipstick.”
In the first three episodes of the series, Fleabag disrupts the world around her by leaning into its transgressive nature — stealing money from a date’s wallet, buying dildos for her sexually frustrated sister (Sian Clifford), and exploding her relationship with Harry so that he can perform his ritualistic post-breakup apartment cleaning, among other destructive acts. Fleabag also disrupts the world in a meta sense, by directly addressing the audience. Jimming to the camera, if you will. At first, these asides feel like a carry-over from the one-woman show — seamlessly blending monologue, stage direction, and action together. In the world of the show, Fleabag is seen as an outsider, daring not only to acknowledge the hyper-sexuality of the world but to lean into it. However, her jims actually validate her lifestyle — as she’s often right about the state of things. During their breakup in episode one, Harry shouts “[Don’t] turn up at my house drunk, in your underwear. It won’t work this time.” Fleabag turns to the camera and smugly shrugs, “It will.” And sure enough, he takes her back when that happens. This chaotic and unflattering life feels like a survival mechanism — she may be ostracized, but hey, she’s right.
The first half of season one (three episodes) is relatively self-contained, with each episode serving as its own story while also carrying the relatively light seasonal arc forward. Fleabag gets a lot of well-deserved praise, but the balance between episodic and serialized storytelling might be one of its most unsung strengths. For decades, episodic storytelling in TV was the norm — think Cheers or Seinfeld, where each episode is essentially a new starting point for casual viewers. Over the last few decades of “peak TV,” serialized stories — told in one series-long narrative — have taken priority. As with any trend, some TV has leaned too far into the nonsensical pace of serialization (any number of Disney+ shows), foregoing entertaining individual episodes in favor of the dreaded “ten-hour movie” approach. Others have unsuccessfully waffled between both, leaving the viewer to ask why they should take its emotional stakes seriously if the characters will just reset in another episode (Atlanta, and, to a lesser extent, Succession.)
Fleabag is the rare example that succeeds. After a hilarious table-setting pilot, episodes two and three are entertaining and self-contained stories that push Fleabag towards personal growth and tease a larger narrative: the suicide of Fleabag’s best friend, Boo (Jenny Rainsford). Episode two focuses on Fleabag’s sexual relationships, with her boyfriend Harry declaring their flat a no-wanking zone so that they can save themselves for each other.1 This ends about as well as expected, with Fleabag pretending to knife-assault Harry in the shower in an attempt to spice things up and Harry discovering Fleabag’s laundry list of porn searches on Google.2 Unfortunately, episode two also introduces one of the weakest parts of Fleabag: Brett Gelman.
Look, I know that the character of Martin (Brett Gelman) is supposed to be horrible — the crass, alcoholic husband of Fleabag’s sister, Claire. I’m sure Gelman is also a nice guy, but goddamn, I cannot stand him on screen.3 We all have those actors that we dislike for no real reason, and Fleabag has sadly been saddled with one of mine. Introduced in episode two and taking center stage in episode three, Martin unlocks a darker piece of Fleabag. As Fleabag and Martin search for a birthday gift for Claire, Martin constantly insults and sexually harasses Fleabag, all under the guise of “joking around.” During this excursion, Fleabag remembers her recently deceased best friend Boo — how they managed their café together, how they drained bottles of wine, and how they laughed their asses off getting high. Now, in the present, Fleabag's world is nightmarish — listening to Martin drunkenly rave about her cup size.
It’s in episode three that the “rightness” of Fleabag’s life collapses. Her jims to the camera, which were always correct in episode one, are now often incorrect. When Fleabag offers her sister a cupcake for her birthday, she jims to the camera, “She won’t eat it.” Claire eats the cupcake. Fleabag is shocked. The insincerity and toxicity that powered Fleabag seem to be losing their potency, and the memories of days spent dicking around with Boo only darken Fleabag’s current situation. When you have a friend who’s also a fuck up, you always have someone at your level to reassure you that you’re right. You can lovingly descend the rungs of poverty and poor taste together. Now that Fleabag is alone, she’s more like Martin than she’d like to think. It’s too late for him — it’s as if the Lovecraftian knowledge that the world’s only commodity is sex has driven him mad — but Fleabag still has time to be a real person.
In episode three, Claire and Fleabag meet at their mother’s grave. A man weeps heavily by a nearby gravestone, and Fleabag calls him a con. “Trust me,” she says, “he’s at a different grave every day. Can’t get enough of it.” Claire stares at her. “You come here every day?” At the end of the episode, after her brother-in-law tried to snog her and she slept with the Bus Rodent, she returns to the cemetery for her morning jog. The crying man, at a different grave, waves to her. Instead of looking at the camera, she waves back.
Fleabag is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.
My favorite line of the first three episodes has to be Fleabag pouting to Harry and saying, “I never masturbate! I don’t know how!
“Anal, gangbang, mature, big cock, small tits, hentai, Asian, teen, MILF, big butts, lesbian, gay, facial, fetish, bukkake, young and old, swallow, rough, voyeur…and public.”
Credit where credit is due, Gelman was one of the few major names to stop working with Adult Swim over their alleged mistreatment of women writers and creators.