On Not Getting Fleabag

I came to Fleabag eventually via Stath Lets Flats, and I was already late to Stath Lets Flats an incomprehensibly brilliant show that somehow uses all of everything Greek to out-nothing Seinfeld in a show where truly nothing happens, even most scenes nothing happens and along the way Stath becomes a father, a man dies and and two people fall in love.

But there isn't much Stath Lets Flats, and when one hungers for more, one discovers Jamie Demetriou is known for it, and Fleabag.

Ahora, people around me had raved about Fleabag calling it "brilliant" and saying things like "I love it" but knowing you knowing me, this is not typically the kind of thing that carries any weight with me in my consumption behaviour. Often quite the reverse, and not even in a contrarian way, but in like a 'do I need to render assistance? No, they've got it covered.' way.

I'd been told it was like something like a show about a woman who gives dating advice and she's grossly unqualified or something. I don't think that's a fair description.

Anyway sufficiently to say, I didn't get it, and having made my way to the end of season 1, don't get it.

I was disoriented in the opening sequence, where Phoebe as Fleabag breaks the fourth wall and describes in an anti-Ballardian way letting a guy insert his penis into her rectum resulting in him giving a tender and moving address the next morning about how much it meant to him to finally have anal sex, before cutting to Fleabag drinking tea in some kind of quaint sitting room looking pensive before she delivers a punchline now 3-4 scenes and 3 minutes in the making "do I have a massive arsehole?"

Here we arrive at where language fails me, because I get it, its just neither surprising nor funny nor interesting. Fleabag will get an audible laugh from me, by episode 6 of season 1 when Olivia Coleman at her exhibition asks Fleabag in front of a wall of moulded penises "Have you seen your father?" which like an innuendo based joke is made interesting by the sinister undertones of their relationship, so Fleabag initially plays into the double entendre by answering at face value that yes she's already seen her father, then Olivia introduces the paradigm shift, the "Jamaica?" turn of indicating she's referring to a mould of the father's dick and balls, then Fleabag taking the blow from the powerplay then proceeds to escalate the joke by correctly identifying her adult father's dick and balls on the wall, and Olivia gets her powerplay right back in her face and both women simply walk away.

That joke is brilliant, and absolutely dies dissecting it. Otherwise I would say that Fleabag is a drama, it reminds me tonally of "Kevin Can F*** Himself" but only the part where sitcom vision is subtracted and its just a bleak drama set in Providence about a poor woman's domestic hell.

Because it has some funny lines and funny scenes, and I mean genuine ones, Fleabag is not the great mystery to me that Bob's Burgers is, where people show me clips and scenes and episodes and act as if the show has jokes in it.

What then would I say Fleabag is a show of if describing it to a stranger, like what is it actually about? I'd say it is a show about putting a brave face on distress. This is essentially the arc of the first season and the tension that is released in the finale - spoiler ahead for a 10 year old show, but in episode 1 we are presented with Fleabag, a quirky, self-absorbed eccentric woman preoccupied with sex, and in an almost incongruous scene she lets slip that her best friend accidently killed herself, but its presented as just another quirky factoid that is incogruously dark in tone when compared to the opening question of "do I have a massive arsehole?"

In the season 1 finale, we finally have the full picture, where Fleabag's best friend who accidentally killed herself by walking into the bike lane with the intention to hurt herself and force her cheating boyfriend to visit her in hospital, the last piece being given is that Fleabag was the woman he cheated on her with. Fleabag is revealed to be a trainwreck, alone, alienated from her family, and wracked with guilt.

So the show is certainly about something. It isn't vacuous. It very much feels like a one-person show from the Edinburgh fringe, produced into a TV series.

So is Fleabag overrated? Is it simply a matter of taste? Is there something wrong with me that I don't get how brilliant Fleabag is from its opening scene?

Well one line of inquiry for me, was how old it is, season 1 released in 2016, it is a year before Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, became the biggest comedy special in the world. Maybe I didn't get Fleabag because I missed the boat, it was a proto-something that no longer has the impact because things have come along since.

It did remind me most of Nanette probably, though where Nanette is not so much intimately, but intrinsically linked with the person of Hannah Gadsby who kept making specials but subtracted the very thing that made Nanette, Nanette and just left her comedy, I feel it is a special that has aged like seafoam, it was a moment that was not frozen in time, it was a strange variant of the "Not!" "jokes" that followed the release of Wayne's World, but lacking the resurgence into public consciousness of Bohemian Rhapsody, it resembled "6-7" in being a thing, without being funny and it has all been landfilled by Gadsby's post-self-deprecating humour which is hard to describe without sounding hateful, when I think the consumer feet-based vote makes it more just a statement of fact - people flocked for the grief porn, and they didn't stay for the jokes.

Anyway, I'd seen this trick 9 years ago, and missed perhaps its first iteration 10 years ago. I was seeing things in the wrong order, Fleabag is actually a drama disguised as a comedy, it is perhaps a deconstruction of Sex & The City, I mean it quite literally is, and it's not clear where it stands on SATC, just that now Carrie has no friends, she is actually as poor as she would be, and she is a train wreck.

Like Springfield minus the Simpsons, everyone in the world is a tragic figure, the same 'prestige' of season 1 as Nanette is more morally ambiguous, Gadsby was unambiguously the victim of a heinous crime, Fleabag is both victim and perpetrator of human tragedy, not malicious but incompetent.

The trick is to 'get us laughing' which understanding that humour is a matter of taste, both Gadsby and Waller-Bridge are just not good at. Being a comic performance rather than a stand up set, her performance falls short of Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler, Olivia Coleman, Carrie Brownstein, Isy Suttie, obviously Julie Louis-Dreyfus (that's never really fair, but Veep while definitely being a comedy, was more dramatic and less a sitcom than Seinfeld) etc. 

Without the novelty, a novelty Phoebe Waller-Bridge may have pioneered ahead of Gadsby, the 'trick' of making someone think for most of 6 episodes, that they are watching a comedy when in fact it is a very dark drama is gone for me now. I've seen it before by consuming media out of sequence, as one might watch Moana now, before watching Pocahontas and not realize one is a soft reboot of the other, and its a bad example because Moana is probably on every level a superior film to Pocahontas with the benefit of two decades for the internet to autopsy everything wrong about Pocahontas.

The other show Fleabag reminded me most of, was "Baby Reindeer" which I could believe was actually commissioned by Netflix as an attempt to get on the Fleabandwagon. Both I believe were born of Edinburgh Fringe shows, and Fleabag certainly feels like an adaptation of a one-woman show, Waller-Bridge's performance feels more like a stage performance than a screen one. Particularly with how often she breaks the fourth wall, which in contrast to baby Reindeer which uses voiceover instead, is something I feel works better or is easier to tolerate on stage than on screen, with voiceover being the opposite.

It's hard, very hard, to describe "Baby Reindeer" as in any way superior to Fleabag, what I would say is that Reindeer's advantage is that it will likely always be a spectacle, less prone to aging out as a precedent by later antecedents. Baby Reindeer takes us on twists and turns, as Fleabag presents us with this low-key zany woman being 'hilariously' irreverent, Baby Reindeer presents us with a victim of stalking, an alt-comedy Hackney working as a bartender shows kindness to a deadbeat woman who then becomes obsessed with him.

Then eventually Reindeer reveals much more ambiguity, with his own backstory being a victim of grooming, dragging his innocent girlfriend into being victimised by his stalker by engaging her before eventually coming to terms with himself so he can eventually disengage from the stalker...I can't really remember it, but what stays with me from Baby Reindeer is that ambiguity where I don't know how I feel about any of the central characters.

Fleabag is much more cut and dry, while it is unusual for sexual infidelities that cross relationships with friendships to have such tragic outcomes. We can both understand Fleabag's guilt and see that while having sex with her best friend and business partner's boyfriend is a betrayal, it is more so his than hers and neither can be held responsible for the cuckold's reaction.

Leaving us simply with this story of 'woman went off the rails, pretends everything is fine' and perhaps in 'not getting' the humour in Fleabag, aside from that one great gag with the penis wall, I wasn't misdirected. I suspect the experience I am supposed to have, is to find the character of Fleabag enviously free, liberated, honest, truthful before I am to be confronted with the underlying distress that defines her.

If I were to give a really poor, a straw-plot analogy, then it would be captured in this old 'Kids In The Hall' sketch brutally titled for the purposes of this post 'Cheap, Crappy Art' with the crucial line being 'I've learned, that people who seem happy, are often unhappy.' Fleabag series one is a portrait of a crying clown, with the innovation such as it is being that we substitute happy/unhappy with free/trapped or confident/insecure.

The point being, that if you stand back far enough and consider what Fleabag is actually about, it's just a forest, I think you need to watch it from up close to be wowed by the novelty of trees. If you can infer forest from the presence/proximity of trees, without having to stand back or send a drone up, then Fleabag I think has become a DVD to be found at a flea market already. 

There simply isn't the quantity for it to be a Peepshow contemporary, or even Stath Lets Flats which at 3 x 6 episodes feels like a really short run sitcom. But I need to acknowledge that there's one whole more season of Fleabag I haven't watched, and perhaps one day I will.

But I notice again, the huge interval between seasons 1 & 2, such that I'm going to go ahead and just assume that season 2 has its own story arc. The one promising aspect of a second series of Fleabag is the delay between seasons 1 & 2 given that it was adapted from an Edinburgh Fringe show, prompting me to recall the massive drop off in the quality of Flight of The Conchords first and second season, which I suspect was the result of season 1 being based on a massively tried and tested body of work touring as a comedy folk-rock act, and season 2 being produced without that material. But Flight of the Conchords second season, while having musical numbers that were frankly shite most notably 'mermaids' for me it still had more laughs in it than Fleabag season 1.

Getting us to a fallacy I think consumers often make and crops up in other domains, the pithy 'Wagner is better than it sounds' fallacy, where the immediate experience of a thing is actually not that enjoyable or engaging, but a consumer becomes convinced that it, most commonly is 'clever' or that it is in some arbitrary way 'two-dimensional' (an example being Midsommer, which as a horror movie is kind of just a soft remake of the original 1970s 'The Wicker Man' and has similar characteristics like being very bright and gay for a horror movie, a genre that more often relies on darkness, the movie is well made but not mind-blowing, with characters that make dumb decisions in a way that the protagonist of the wicker man does not, but many I have come across seem, in my estimation, overly impressed by the trivia that Midsommer is a metaphor for the failure of a relationship.)

Fleabag is two-dimensional in terms of 'it makes you think this woman has no shame, but actually she is full of shame!' and it's the kind of thing I can't retrodict as to whether in 2016 by September, I would have in any way been impressed by this. I only got around to watching it in 2026 where my learnings since have left me at a place where I don't get it. 

I don't get it's 100% and 91% reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but then, I also don't get how one would review a show that doesn't really have any flaws, but for me, doesn't really have any selling points either. 

Here's what I will give it, especially over Baby Reindeer and Nanette, from all my research as far as I can tell Fleabag is not based on actual events. It feels plausible, and perhaps the fact that Pheobe Waller-Bridge appears to have comic talent commensurate to, if not exceeding Gadsby and Gadd, but far shy of Coleman, Sutty, Tarbuck, Whelan, Phillips, Morgan, Conaty, Godliman et al. it is very good simulacra as in, if you told me tomorrow that Fleabag was really Phoebe Waller-Bridge and she did sleep with her deceased best friend's boyfriend leading to her accidental suicide and the Fleabag Monologue was based on actual events, I'd believe it.

Otherwise, I'd say it was an example of alt-comedy from a point early in a period where the zeitgeist got obsessed with trauma, wearing it somewhat like a jaunty hat. And so maybe I do get it.