If You’re Missing Live Theater Right Now, Stream I Hate Suzie

I Hate Suzie is about an adult woman absolutely losing her shit. Suzie Pickles takes the batteries out of her son’s toy to power her vibrator. She pulls up her fur coat to have anxiety diarrhea. She attends a crucial business meeting high on ecstasy. In the first of eight episodes, streaming now on HBO Max, she wanders her quaint English town, smeared in fake blood, singing about her feelings like an ingenue in a musical who hasn’t quite coordinated with the ensemble.

There’s nothing like observing an interesting woman during a breakdown. After months of escaping the pandemic by watching Emily in Paris eat croissants and fantasizing about drinking with the good people of the La Quinta Resort, I Hate Suzie feels like a proper meal.

Suzie Pickles (played by the spectacular Billie Piper) was a child sensation. She won a Britain’s Got Talent–style show and became a pop star. Her parents mismanaged her career, but she survived to join the B-list as the lead in a cult-hit sci-fi series. Now she has an adorable son, a professor husband, and a job as the protagonist of a so-so TV show about fighting Nazi zombies.

And then stolen photos are leaked to the web showing her performing oral sex on what people are calling “a penis of color.” (It does not belong to her husband.) Sex—or at least the criminal exposure of her private sex life—has undone her: Suzy’s career is a joke, her marriage is a sham, and she has become the national face of female shame.

In another TV show, this would begin a journey of a woman putting her life back together, punctuated every few scenes with makeover montages over female-empowerment anthems. Not this time. The photo theft—which echoes the giant celebrity hack of 2014—is a profound violation. It reveals that Susie doesn’t have a single boundary to protect herself. She doesn’t even really have much of a self to protect. She’s forever a child entertainer, a constant performer who transforms into whatever people want her to be. When a police officer declines to seriously investigate the hack—“Unfortunately, we can’t afford to prioritize crimes where the victims contribute to their own victimization”—she smiles and agrees to join him in a selfie. In her world, consent is a privilege to which she is not entitled.

Losing yourself to the desires of others—it’s not just a child-actor thing, but a woman thing, a daughter thing, a mother thing, a wife thing. That’s the stealthy argument of I Hate Suzie, which was developed by Piper with Lucy Prebble, a celebrated British playwright who has also written for Succession. The most deliciously satisfying scenes are about the burning passion of female friendship, a relationship that often involves finding and losing yourself in equal measure. Suzie and her best friend and manager, Naomi (Laila Farzad), make the fireworks of romantic relationships seem as unremarkable as iPhone flashlights. Their friendship is giant—bigger, in some ways, than Suzie’s relationship with her husband or son.

“If you’d told your best friend who you were banging, I would have thrown myself across his cock like one of JFK’s bodyguards,” Naomi tells Suzie, in the fallout of her sex scandal.

“Well, like them, you have failed,” Suzie snaps.

“Refuse to be shamed,” Naomi roars, dealing with newspapers trying to publish Suzie’s private photos. “You publish a nude? We publish a nude. You send one of ours to the sex hospital? We send one of yours to the sex morgue.” Farzad, as Naomi, deserves her own show, if not her own lifestyle corporation or cult.

Naomi has all the strength and conviction, and Suzie has all the soft warmth and domesticity. But Suzie can’t masturbate without thinking about Naomi—not because she’s attracted to her, but because Naomi is embedded in her consciousness. It’s the perfect codependent female friendship—life-giving and disastrous. “I know you better than I know myself,” Naomi tells Suzie, in the most devastating of the show’s several breakup scenes. “And that’s not right, is it?”

I Hate Suzie has the high-quality dialogue, performances, and dramatic risk-taking of a piece of great theater. If you’ve missed the feeling of having your worldview reshaped by a night in a dark room surrounded by captivated strangers, this will tide you over until the vaccine. And like a lot of really exciting theater, it’s a bit of a mess.

The biggest flaw of the ambitious I Hate Suzie is that it has all the time in the world for complexity, as long as the subject is a white woman. The show refuses an intersectional approach to feminism—treating womanhood as an identity that overlaps with other identities like class, race, and sexuality. From the very first episode, the show builds the case that Suzie is to be pitied because of hardships like the fact that she tidies her home before the housekeeper arrives, and that if she quits her job she won’t be able to live in a giant, luxurious house. It presents the almost laughable idea that a major TV star faces constant harassment at the hands of the poorly paid women of color who come to her home to do a magazine shoot.

When we see Suzie self-actualizing, she does it by yelling at a series of service workers. The man with whom she has an affair is Black—but, the show implies, at least he’s a man! The story seems depressingly determined to narrow its audience. The beauty of Suzie’s breakdown becomes a buffet of wealthy white women's feelings.

That’s too bad, because there is a lot that’s universal in Suzie’s story. As the public, we like to fatten up actresses with glamour and attention, then feast upon them like veal the moment they make a misstep. Regular women experience a version of the same thing, but with fewer free clothes. Shame is one of the major themes of being a woman. Sometimes all there is to do is absolutely lose it.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer at Glamour.

Originally Appeared on Glamour