Nobody breaks the fourth wall like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
It’s an old TV trick, turning to the camera to address the audience—one that arises out of theater, where an character shares their inner thoughts in a soliloquy. But there’s a reason that few shows attempt this, outside of newsmagazines and game shows: Looking straight into your audience’s eyes is intimate enough to be awkward.
Waller-Bridge, the creator, writer, and lead of Fleabag, turns that uncomfortable immediacy into art. The first season of the show, which debuted in 2016, focused on an unnamed young woman (Waller-Bridge) binging on sex to avoid mourning her best friend. From the very first scene, Waller-Bridge addresses the camera—an echo of the one-woman show on which the series is based, also titled Fleabag.
Onstage, the audience would take in not only a squirming, slouching woman on a barstool, but also the dark stage around her, and the rows of heads between her chair and yours. Onscreen, there’s only her face—tall forehead, square chin, sharp nose, a curling bob—and an expressive pair of dark eyes that pin you to the wall. Waller-Bridge, as the character we may as well call Fleabag, confesses to, jokes at, and flirts with the camera, flicking her gaze over to share a silent agony or deliver a secret punchline. The audience is drawn under her spell—we cackle conspiratorially at her private jokes, and thrill at the misbehavior she lets us see—which makes the season’s plot twists ache all the more.
In the first scene of Season 2, which debuts on Amazon May 17, Fleabag herself stands in front of a mirror in a revealing black jumpsuit, dabbing drops of blood away from her nose. With a deep slit at the front and back, the outfit is sexy, chic, and revealing—as if she’s been gashed open, gutted and exposed. The character’s forehead birthmark (Waller-Bridge’s own) is almost always carefully hidden, but in this moment, we can see it, before she adjusts her hair over it again. She does the best she can with the blood, as the camera captures her in profile. Then she slides her eyes over to us with a saucy, secretive smile, and says, “This is a love story.”
With that, the tone is set—and paves the way for a season that is deeper, more intricately wrought, and even cheekier than the first, one that layers deep belly laughs with tender vulnerability. It’s a rollercoaster; the balance between high-stakes drama and outrageous laughter is even less stable than in Season 1. Season 2 also belies more of Waller-Bridge’s theatrical roots. One-on-one conversations become electric, intimate battlegrounds; each character’s emotional nuance is both astonishing and hard to keep up with. I felt grateful for the pause at the end of each episode, a brief respite from the rich, clamoring world inside our protagonist’s head. But I also could not wait to start the next one, to see where the ride would take us next.
The season begins with the impending nuptials of Fleabag’s father (Bill Paterson) and stepmother (Oscar-winner Olivia Colman, milking every drop out of “wicked stepmother”). The production necessitates familial cooperation, even though Fleabag hasn’t spoken to her sister Claire (Sian Clifford) or Claire’s odious, handsy husband Martin (Brett Gelman) in months. Waller-Bridge’s protagonist has grown in the 371 days since we’ve seen her; her café is a success, and she’s sworn off anonymous sex. At the awful, uproarious dinner that takes up the whole first episode, the family tries to reconcile. That’s when Fleabag first meets the swearing, drinking, uncomfortably attractive Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) who will marry the happy couple.
As she said: This is a love story.
It would not be fair to give away anymore of the plot. For the Fleabag of Season 1 to meet a sexy priest is already the setup to a joke; as she has confessed to the audience already, her need to be wanted obliterates almost everything else in her head. But God is a tricky speed bump—and though we’ve been seduced by her from afar, we haven’t seen Fleabag in love before. She blooms, almost against her will, suddenly appearing in red dresses with a smile on her face. “Shut up,” she tells the camera.
From the first episode of this season, Fleabag suggests that our protagonist cannot heal unless the people around her do, too—chiefly, her type-A sister, who bottles up as much as Fleabag spills out. The second season gives Claire a lot more to do, and Clifford rises to the occasion, hurtling toward triumph in her own distinct way. The two sisters’ tension arises out of the most natural place, the same place that all of Fleabag toys with: the need to be seen, and the complete horror of being seen. With their partners and their parents, they can compartmentalize, but with each other, they are completely stripped bare. Waller-Bridge expertly captures the artless conversation of close family—the sentence fragments and half-verbalized noises and scowling facial expressions that arise out of being imperfect in front of other people.
Throughout this magnificent second season, Fleabag buzzes with life. The characters are so well-drawn, and the performers so skillful, that each frame is resonant with their interpersonal friction—and laden with their unspoken shame. The show’s lightning pace makes its nuances flash by almost too quickly to see, but they’re very much there. Fleabag glances at the camera with ever-more fleeting eye contact, and shows us her birthmark more. There are unsaid layers lurking beneath every conversation. She sits down with the sexy priest, and he can see her looking away, to us; he tries to follow her gaze, and for a heart-stopping moment, he makes eye contact with the audience. It’s a moment as thrilling as a jump scare, and just as breathless. Fleabag is so keyed into what makes us rattle and tremble that it can turn a cup of tea into an earthquake.
Waller-Bridge is ending Fleabag with this season, and as you’ll see, her (flawless) ending is a decisive one. I wish we had more of it; it’s hard to let go of such a vibrant show, one that takes so much joy in the giddy mess that is life, even when it crashes and burns in the middle of a London night. Fleabag is so precise and lethal that it feels like an answer—an answer to a question I didn’t even know I’d asked. Now I don't know what I'll do without it.
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