Fleabag ’s Season 2 Is as Good as TV Gets
How’s your Game of Thrones finale hangover? Still recovering from Tyrion’s “nothing more powerful in the world than a good story” speech? Still trying to figure out why Brienne was reduced to LiveJournaling her feelings for Jaime? Still thinking, basically, WTF . . . King Bran? Here’s the remedy: the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hilarious, mordant, heartbreaking Fleabag, now streaming on Amazon Prime. Is there any overlap between the GoT and Fleabag crowd? There has to be. Fans of actually good TV know that you don’t need dragons, Dothraki, and mass murder to generate excitement. Turns out a squabbling family dinner and a miscarriage will do.
Those are the elements of the first episode of Fleabag 2, and I haven’t seen anything as rivetingly good on a small screen in as long as I can remember. (And that includes the sharp-witted first season of Fleabag, which premiered in 2016, and which Fleabag 2 manages to improve upon.) There is no shortage of Waller-Bridge praise around the Internet right now, but let me join in on the chorus. As the writer and director and star of this short burst of episodes (six in all, none more than a half hour in length), she is incredibly, frighteningly on top of her game. There is something distilled and uncompromising in her point of view, a mix of pitilessness and empathy that roughs you up a little even as it makes you laugh out loud. Her punches—and punchlines—land.
If you missed the first season, please start there. Those six episodes introduced us to Waller-Bridge’s titular (and unnamed) heroine, who is unmoored and sexually self-destructive—even as she remains somehow totally in command of herself. Here is the paradox of Fleabag: She is ruthlessly confident and mortally insecure. Punctuated by fourth-wall asides to the camera—too many, some have argued—Fleabag 1 chronicled her fumbling attempts to simply deal with life: an uptight sister (Sian Clifford), awful brother-in-law (Brett Gelman), widowed father (Bill Paterson), and his bohemian girlfriend (Olivia Colman), and (as we learn) recently deceased best friend (Jenny Rainsford).
The first season ended with a powerful reveal that I won’t spoil here. Season two picks up less than a year later with Fleabag dabbing an enormous amount of blood off of her face in a restaurant bathroom. “This is a love story,” she assures us. And it is. You may have heard about the season’s “hot priest” (Andrew Scott), over whom viewers in the U.K., where this season began airing in March, more or less lost their shit (according to the New York Times, a British porn site reported enormous increases in “religious”, “nun”, and “priest” searches). Scott is handsome and goofily appealing, and his stymied-by-celibacy love affair with Fleabag gives the new season its sexual heat, and equally, its emotional warmth.
But the savage humor is intact throughout, and that dysfunctional family dinner in the first episode is only a taste. Everyone is making hilariously terrible choices: Fleabag’s father marrying his artist girlfriend (Colman, in the role, is more frightening than Cersei Lannister), her sister keeping her worthless marriage together. Waller-Bridge has an incredible cast and has added to her riches with cameos by Fiona Shaw and Kristin Scott Thomas—the latter of whom has an absolute showstopping monologue about menopause.
Fleabag is feminist, humanist, and piercingly sad. It’s also over! The whole arc, seasons one and two, amounts to less than six hours and leaves you equally satisfied and heartbroken. To which I say: see GoT? That is how you end a series.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
