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Tyears ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge he locked eyes with the camera and asked the audience: “Do I have a big hole?” An impromptu line to a monologue about a takeover call that went spectacularly – and literally – south, announced Waller-Bridge as the new star of British telly. The half-hour comedy series Fleabag broke the fourth wall, and the internet. His second season was bigger, which made many thinkers talk about Andrew Scott as a “hot priest” and the sold Topshop jumpsuit worn by Waller-Bridge, which had a closed hole that revealed a small part of the boob.
Both Fleabag and Waller-Bridge have been praised for blazing a trail that women’s shows and women’s creations would later blaze. It got Waller-Bridge an exclusive deal with Amazon worth $20m (£16m) a year. The success of the show really changed Waller-Bridge’s life. But, over the next decade, as the British media industry was reshaped by rising audiences, shrinking budgets and dwindling opportunities for new talent, how did TV change?
It seems strange to remember the time when Ed Miliband, who was the leader of the opposition, was forced to wear a T-shirt with the words, “This is what women look like”, but in the middle of the 2010s, pop feminism was everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except on British TV. A report by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain revealed that from 2001 to 2016, only 14% of prime-time TV was written by women, with a saddening 11% in sitcoms. “We knew, even before we made Fleabag, that the gender gap was dire, and there’s always a desire to change it,” says Chris Sussman, the former director of BBC comedy who helped develop the show.
Things had already started to change. In the US, Lena Dunham’s Girls debuted in 2012 and was like Bad Sex and the City. for thousands of years. It created a sense of feminist drama written by women that was gritty, uncomfortable, challenging and compelling. There was also the fact that its author was its star, and the deliberately blurred line between the creator and the protagonist encouraged the audience to see the characters as torn from life and thus believable (which was often not the case in comedies made by men). The period followed by an explosion of semi-autobiographical half-hour semi-autobiographical half-hour writers-artists, including Catastrophe (co-creator, Sharon Horgan, was previously featured in Drag), Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life and Aisling Bea’s This Way Up.
Fleabag was part of this wave, but it went through a path that many of its contemporaries did not, perhaps for reasons that were not its fault. “Fleabag is very well embedded in the mainstream of unruly white girls and personal stories,” says Faye Woods, associate professor of film and television at the University of Reading. “Alma’s Not Normal doesn’t go the same way,” says Sophie Willan’s BBC sitcom about the actress and prostitute in Bolton. Similarly, Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, about a working girl sheltered from a religious family, and her search for sexual knowledge – which, like Fleabag, also broke the fourth wall – was, he says, “full of words”.
Social media marketing is very easy and marketing is a proven success story. Although Fleabag’s rise was relatively small compared to its peers, it also opened the door for many shows by women from different backgrounds. “Fleabag probably gave a lot of confidence to female comedians to say: ‘Yes, I can go and have my own show,'” and to encourage “commissioners to commission those shows”, says Sussman.
Another international success story was Coel’s second, I May Destroy You, which explores issues related to sex, gender and power. Starting in 2020, it became fresh and timely, as well as technical, the final part shows the disturbing, choose-your-own-end of its hero. Author Arabella (Coel) meets her rapist in three suspected cases, but none of them bring closure. Like Fleabag, it was a very original show where emotional guts were mixed with comedy. Major topics such as grief, rape and mental illness were covered in half an hour, but without losing the sense of humor.
Produced by HBO, I May Destroy You was also ambitious, with visuals and occasional cameos. The British half-hour sitcom was taking on a new form: a hybrid, a hybrid of comedy and drama, heavily fueled by American investment. “We tried to make Fleabag look like a drama rather than a comedy, and to spend a lot of money to create an aesthetic that you didn’t know,” says Harry Williams, who created the show.
In contrast to the wounded, gonzo style of 00s comedies (think Peep Show or Green Wing), the high-end fare of Fleabag and I May Destroy You gave the impression of a global ambition. This was possible because of the production subsidy. Indeed, it has now become the norm for international advertisers to partner with British broadcasters, as domestic budgets stagnate or shrink. Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+ and A24 have stepped in to close the gap, offering new female-led fare, including Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts (Peacock) and the BBC’s Such Brave Girls (A24).
If Waller-Bridge became the undisputed center of British comedy produced by women, it also became something of a spectacle. Rose Matafeo, the creator of Starstruck, says she remembers the comparison of her show to Fleabag as “a compliment and a bit of laziness”. A romcom about a movie worker and an actor, the tone of Starstruck couldn’t be more different. “It’s like: ‘It’s amazing to see this kind of millennial chaos, just to see someone’s car drifting through life.'” It is interesting to see women making such mistakes! “‘Oh God, am I more guilty than I feel?'” she recalls. “That was my problem, as it became a way to describe a female character who was written in depth (which) television wasn’t used at the time.”
This has changed over the past decade. With so many characters featuring girls who are funny, sexy, self-destructive and lovable, women’s stories have evolved beyond the “millennial” that Fleabag made popular. There are characters like Linda in Bridget Christie’s The Change – a 50-year-old going through a miscarriage – and Daisy May Cooper’s mother and Selin Hizli’s Am I Being Unreaction? Kat Sadler’s Brave Girls, known as a gen Z genius, follows two teenage sisters as they navigate debt, abortion and suicidal thoughts with a keen and bright eye.
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Fleabag’s motivations were real. It began life as a one-woman play and was produced as part of a pilot program by the BBC. “The money was small, but the pressure was small,” said Lydia Hampson, one of Fleabag’s creators. Its unexpected success is difficult to reverse-engineer, especially when the stakes are high. With public service broadcasters spending less on developing up-and-coming talent, there is more pressure on writers to mold themselves to the existing mold. “Now there’s a lot of media, and they’re giving a lot of high-end TV. But if you’re eating 10 Michelin-starred meals a week, you’re only going to want to eat a burger,” says Hampson, who insists a return to scrappiness is essential.
He says: “I’ve seen that as a producer in the last five years. These big movies are like: ‘If we can point to IP, then we can point to subscriber numbers, and then we can point to witnesses,'” he says. “But if something can come back under the radar, like Fleabag did, that can loosen the purse strings that are not in danger…” This is the surprising phenomenon of Fleabag’s success: the money it attracted to the British comedy raised expectations – and money – independently of the shows that want to follow after it.
It is no coincidence that two of the biggest British exports of the decade began at the Edinburgh festival. For Francesca Moody, creator of the theaters Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, their subsequent success is a direct result of her roots in experimental theater. “It’s where professionals are given the opportunity to test ideas, take risks and be disruptive,” he says.
Since Fleabag, Waller-Bridge’s work has been very low-key. He created the TV version of Killing Eve and scored a hit in the first season. But aside from this, his only credit is as a co-writer of the James Bond film No Time to Die, and as the star of the latest Indiana Jones sequel (although the TV remake of Tomb Raider, which he produced, is on the way), which leads to internet jokes that he is collecting millions of dollars from his Amazon assets while seemingly doing nothing. (Then again, great work takes time.) Waller-Bridge has undoubtedly shaped the British TV industry, even if she is no longer at the forefront.
When I think of Fleabag, I think of this image: a dramatic close-up of Waller-Bridge’s face, mascara running down her cheeks. One woman’s experience and perspective suddenly had symbolic power. She was, despite all the noise after the show, no “any woman”; just, in her own words, “a greedy, crooked, selfish, uncaring, cynical, promiscuous, worthless woman who can’t even call herself a woman”. Now, he is not the only one on our screens.
