Three years ago, the first season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag didn’t end neatly. Having alienated her family, the otherwise unnamed title character (Waller-Bridge) was broken down, left only with one bittersweet ray of hope: a loan to keep her floundering café afloat, despite how much it reminded her of her recently deceased best friend. The audience was dropped randomly into this chaotic six-episode microcosm of her life and left it just as suddenly. Her characterization was so frank and vivid that it seemed like she had the capacity to go forward, not necessarily in a second season but beyond the bounds of the screen. Her future was uncertain, though she seemed to have one nonetheless. The danger of a belated sophomore season, then, is that it might upend the first season’s near-perfect balance of acerbic comedy and emotional devastation. But Waller-Bridge slides effortlessly back into Fleabag’s existence, having lost none of her dizzying spark as an actor and storyteller.
The first episode picks up over a year after the events of the last season, at an awkward family dinner celebrating the engagement of Fleabag’s father (Bill Paterson) to her fabulously passive-aggressive godmother (Olivia Colman). Things have changed. Fleabag is no longer using sex to, as she puts it in a therapy session, “deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart.” Her café is doing well, though she’s not on good terms with her sister, Claire (Sian Clifford), who’s still with her goon of a husband, Martin (Brett Gelman). Also at the table: the drinking, foxphobic, swearing Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) who’s to officiate the wedding; it’s “chic,” Fleabag’s godmother insists. He’s also, as the sisters later agree, hot.
In a departure from the show’s previously more broad, disconnected nature, the second season is centered around the deepening relationship between Fleabag and the priest. The looming wedding marks a clear end point for the season’s storyline, while the longing and tension between two ostensibly celibate people (both previously anything but) gives Waller-Bridge plenty of material to dredge up more comedy—“He’s in a bad relationship,” Fleabag vaguely says of the priest to her therapist (Fiona Shaw), who repeatedly insists there should be no jokes during the session—and introspection about the nature of loss, love, and relationships. Waller-Bridge still has a huge swath of things on her mind, from the existential abyss that death leaves behind to what it means to rely on other people; jealousy and loneliness come with the territory, and family fits awkwardly into the middle of it all.
Fleabag still breaks the fourth wall with sly, perfectly timed asides and knowing, ain’t-I-a-stinker glances. In a particularly memorable scene, she’s in the middle of telling Martin off when she suddenly stops to admire how well she’s doing, only to bungle the whole thing seconds later. But Scott’s priest throws her amusingly off-balance. Their delightful chemistry buoys the show’s newfound focus, with the priest’s sweet optimism in flirtatious conflict with Fleabag’s own quick, dry cynicism. He syncs up so well with her inner thoughts that he begins to outright invade them by noticing when she talks to the camera.
Given Fleabag’s preoccupation with loss and the difficulty of facing the unknown, it feels natural for the show to take up questions of religion. And Waller-Bridge even uses those questions to analyze the very format of her show, with the fourth-wall-breaking paralleled to prayer. By positing comedy as a coping mechanism for the feelings Fleabag has yet to sort out, the series and the very camera the audience views it through come to represent a retreat inward, as well as a demonstration of control that its protagonist resents.
What makes Fleabag feel so authentic is its messiness. Its thematic questions are broad, its history is spooned out over time instead of at the most convenient expositional moments, and its characters are at once detailed and vague enough to suggest lives being lived, regardless of whether or not they’re lived on camera. Even the smallest roles are ascribed idiosyncrasies that allude to actual personhood, to say nothing of the depth and understanding displayed through main characters like Claire, Fleabag, their father, and the priest.
With the characters and their histories now mostly clear to the audience, the story moves along a somewhat less bold, more conventional path compared to last season, which constantly doubled back by recontextualizing and reexamining itself. Despite this more straightforward approach, though, the series still boasts Waller-Bridge’s unmistakable voice and her witty, resonant characterizations. For better or worse, the romantic through line and designated endpoint tie up threads left dangling last season, neatly boxing up some of the themes in the process rather than leaving them to hang in the air.
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