Guest Squee: Fleabag

NB: We’re back with another guest squee! Guest reviewer Diana recently started watching Fleabag on Amazon Prime. It’s currently a six-episode series available for streaming!

Diana Kirk is a writer living on the coast of Oregon with her hot as fuck husband and three blonde boys. Her book Licking Flames: Tales of a Half-Assed Hussy comes out in December 1. You can read her essays and fiction pieces in Thought Catalog, Literary Kitchen, Yellow Mama, and Blue Skirt.

The first three minutes of this show is everything I want to consume in a good contemporary romance novel. But instead of going to wedding town, it goes straight down the rabbit hole with no apologies. Amazon Prime’s newest show Fleabag, starts with a meet-cute with hot guy and awkward girl wrapped around witty dialogue, which then turns into hot sex, which then turns into her questionable life choices. And the best part is…all the nastiness we might expect of male characters belongs to a Her this time. It yells…Yes, we women can be douchebags, too!

We immediately get that Fleabag is not doing well. She’s behind on rent and bills at her very unsuccessful London cafe. In fact, we immediately get she makes a lot of mistakes in life. She drinks too much, fucks too much, and steals too much for any young woman of allegedly posh middle class. She’s lost in life, yet going through the motions of what she thinks she should be doing. Dinner parties, weekend getaways, dates – and failing at all of them. But there are reasons for her actions that, as they are revealed, give her character a lot more depth and complexity than merely, “She’s a jerk.”

This show is delicious. I can think of no better word. It’s about the gritty emotional pain that life sometimes throws at you, mixed with a carefully planned life, and a single woman almost desperately trying to find her place in both worlds. Fleabag watches her sister’s unhappy marriage while bumping through society’s expectation that Fleabag herself find happiness, and it all clashes in embarrassing hilarity. Because Fleabag flip flops from caring what people think and not caring, she reminded me at times of Charlize Theron in the movie Young Adult but with a tad more effort to be “good.”

The writing is top notch and they’ve got some really great rapid fire exchanges like this one between Fleabag and her “perfect sister:”

“You look stressed.”

“Well, I’m successful.”

The woman playing Fleabag is British writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge who’s been knocking around BBC shows for years. I first found her on Netflix’s Crashing. On that show she plays the always fun yet deeply fucked up Lulu. If you haven’t caught it, I recommend you watch it at least thru episode 2 as Crashing has a slow start. Episode 5 broke my heart. More episodes are coming from both shows, both written by Waller-Bridge herself and both semi-autobiographical. More women TV writers, yes. Let’s do that!

Where Crashing is more sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, Fleabag focuses on the relationship feels. All the characters are so repressed, you wanna slip them an Earl Gray enema. They all have difficult relationships with one another and Fleabag is treated a little like a childish black sheep because she doesn’t follow the rules of “Smile and sip wine.” They’re afraid of her and of her feelings, so they all try their hardest to not even see her sadness. So sometimes she just throws her glass down to break the tension.

Fleabag’s loneliness and desperation for acceptance are the heart of the show. At times her smiles and “I’m fines” grated on me. I began to question the authenticity of those pretenses until finally one guy she fucks in her café after meeting him on a bus, calls her on her own shit.

“You don’t think that growing up with teeth like mine means I can’t tell when someone’s faking it?”

Yeah, he had teeth like a beaver. And his timing was perfect. He arrived exactly when I felt like she needed a dose of reality. She’s really not fooling anyone.

My favorite relationship is with her equally douchey brother-in-law Martin, played by comedian Brett Gelman. Martin is creepy weird and played perfectly. The fact that he genuinely loves his wife and wants to cheat on her is how I’d best describe this show. It questions the boxes we’re all expected to live in.

But while she cannot deal with her family, Fleabag thrives with strangers, such as the drunk woman at the bus stop with her boob hanging out of her bra, or the sad man at a retreat who is separated from his wife. There are these moments where you see Fleabag genuinely caring about others. She puts the woman in a taxi and listens to the man go on about missing his wife and only wanting to make her orgasm again. This is when you see her heart, and how wonderfully she can relate to these strangers and their dark embarrassing pain – which is so like hers.

Fleabag is currently only six episodes at 30 minutes each. I watched all six over two nights. I’m now totally team Fleabag. I hope next season, the unexpected man walks right through her café door, after she’s nicked his wallet on the bus, and instead of acting surprised by her boldness or her pretty smile, he instead holds her hands tight behind her back and says, “Cut the shit, I see you.”

Sigh, that would be hot.

Have you watched Fleabag? What did you think? Do you recommend it?