Fleabag

[A] truly wonderful new comedy. ... How Waller-Bridge walks her character up to the edge of emotional frailty and then only explores a small part of it, brings out the pathos that so clearly lies behind the comedy and leaves you wanting more development and character exploration.

Fleabag is such an exciting new series it’s hard to settle down long enough to appreciate its many impressive attributes.

Fleabag unpacks the life of a complicated young woman--with all of its pain, insecurity, anger, humor, friendship, impulses, and more--with a unique sensibility that makes it essential viewing.

Waller-Bridge has a bracing willingness to let entire scenes play out just to build to one absurd joke at the end, and she proves adept at giving characters and moments the touch of specificity that makes them feel real and human.

I came into the series expecting a raunchy black comedy, and got that, but with the added bonus of something achingly beautiful when it wanted to be.

[A] funny, highly profane but surprisingly poignant dramedy (originally a stage play) about a sexually compulsive woman in London.

Eventually, though, what emerges in the series is a nuanced--if slightly bizarre--portrait of a woman in distress.

Fleabag is so wonderfully messy, funny, and deeply human that these seemingly chaotic collisions feel natural.

The show itself is sneakily insightful. ... Waller-Bridge’s awkwardness, her moments of rampant egoism followed by crushing bleakness, make Fleabag one of the most distinctive female characters in recent memory. Never has being a modern woman seemed so painfully funny, so brutal, and so hopeless, all at once.

Once set in play, each of these [belated-coming-of-age tropes] devices gets turned inside out--quickly (each episode is 30 minutes) and surreptitiously (the action, like Fleabag’s life, jumps from scene to scene), but with a clear eye for truth that often becomes, like all good comedy, quite devastating.

Around the middle of the season, the show takes aim at a couple of easy targets in an episode set at a silent retreat full of huffy New Age types, but then it skirts past some of the obvious jokes to conclude with scenes that are both warmly goofy and ever-so-slightly earnest. In its home stretch, it also gains depth and unexpected power, and its first-season finale is not to be missed.

This Fleabag will make you squirm between laughs. [26 Sep 2016-2 Oct 2016, p.17]

Each of Fleabag’s six episodes is a tightly-composed variation on her character’s wild, bad-girl humor, and her personal (especially sexual) and professional frustration.

The whole show is a study of this woman’s personality, and talking to the audience feels integral to who she is. Because of Waller-Bridge’s delivery, that talking also can be funny as hell.

Fleabag's a heartbreaker, sometimes hilariously so.

What sets the show apart isn’t the surface quality of its humor but its restless, almost feral energy and its slap-in-the-face attitude.

Getting to know these characters can be incredibly entertaining but, like the pets each keeps at arm’s length in their respective shows, they’re best experienced in limited doses.