Fleabag

the priest felt v close to home for me which is what made me so angry with him. you could see it all coming a mile off, and while she clearly wanted him to Be A Naughty Priest for her, he could tell she was vulnerable and acted irresponsibly & selfishly while using all the trappings and glamour of his supposedly v responsible & selfless position. it's how he let himself be turned into her fantasy that was seedy. he and fleabag were similar & equal enough personally, & while its understandable for her to blur that connection with his pastoral, even divine role, using that role to get what he wanted was a betrayal of himself as a priest. she gets to play a helpless lost soul (which you could see as a kind of dishonest betrayal of herself) seeking his guidance, offering herself up to him (vulnerability is hot, sure). he has to dirty the distinction, if it ever really existed, between his personal desires and his religious calling; he has to corrupt himself (which is arguably hot in a fallen angel way but much darker). it goes some way to pointing towards an inherent problem with the notion of the clergy. if it were just hot it wldn't be so good: it's also deeply compromised & dishonest & unstable

yes, otm

am i wrong to think that in the finale a few of the characters were picking up that they were trapped in a fictional structure? ex. the godmother's "i always just call you darling," martin's speech about being born with a shitty personality

if you were so inclined you could also fold the resistance to and ultimate embrace of the "running to the airport" cliche into that I think

yes i was absolutely thinking that too

also every use of the statue throughout both seasons was exquisite, it's kind of a delayed payoff machine

They made the statue bigger in series 2.

ogmor i dont disagree but it was still v v hot, fuckedup-ness and all (and i wonder why i am single?)

it was v hot, it was a v recognizable portrayal of two people falling in love with each other but which circumstance and individual weakness inevitably subvert

which, hey, gotta say that resembles... all of my relationships

i continue to read the mugging to the camera, the priest's recognition of that and additional moments of existential clarity and terror as an awareness of audience/author as god

the priest interfering with the fourth wall breaking was a really great way of depicting the intensity and intimacy of their connection too

I concluded she looks like Bran Stark warging to other characters when she does it. everyone else was too polite to mention it.

no one in this show is polite

Everyone is too self-involved to notice!
Priest is more open & perceptive & genuinely interested in Fleabag

I fully expected a hookup with the priest as soon as he was introduced but the way it happened had me mumbling "oh noooo"

The character was real enough to me that I wanted him to both be able to be a good priest and have this fling, but somehow compartmentalize the two aspects of their relationship. That it felt like a real violation.. that's good storytelling!

I haven't heard anyone say much about the story arc with the banker, but it might be my favorite subplot. Started as kind of a cheap set-up, and ends with something that wasn't telegraphed from the start.

The evolution between the two series was really well done, in a way I haven't seen in many shows. When you think of Fleabag as the point of view character, the shallower characterization of nearly everyone else in the first season echoes her own perceptions as she's stuck at a higher level of, let's say fucked-upness, and season two immediately sets a different baseline. As viewers we're seeing things about people that she's noticing, and she's operating at a more functional level than her family in a lot of ways.

i couldn't watch s1 cos the other characters were so completely stupid. i just had to stop.

started a rewatch of s1 cuz id forgotten it -- the dude who plays harry's performance when she "surprises" him in the shower in ep2 is fucking amazing

harry genuinely one of my favorite characters

a lot of it is in that performance

the shower surprise scene was so good

it made me wonder what else she'd done to harry any time he started to get too close

he plays a similarly sweet, baffled character in W1A

the sex scene w/them where she ends up just masturbating and flinching when he touches her is amazing

There's lots of stuff, characters, situations in S1 that just are not believable even within the world she's created (I know this is a bugbear of mine, as Tracer might remember with regard to Motherland) but the guy with the teeth, the extremely handsome boyfriend, for example, are barely characters and are not believable. The worst example was at the Sexhibition where the stepmother makes her be a waitress with a tray full of glasses of champagne. Just not believable as a situation. That could never happen.

In S2 the outrageous elements were things you could believe could happen. That's only a minor reason why it worked but it did help.

Ha I do and I agree with all that but doesn't she again get pressed into service at a party in a similar way in S2? Sorry brain = sieve, I'm struggling to remember exactly. The church fair?

The stepmother making her serve drinks at the exhibit seemed totally believable! She was already a "server" at her cafe and it's one of those jobs that people assume you do for free for friends and family.

s2 i think she was volunteering at the church fair and she caters and serves at her sister's company event.

yeah i mean i don't care for realism too much, a drama that has a world with its own internal logic is fine, but s1 was so deeply stupid and underwritten in almost every character/plot except a few fleabag monologues. ultimately she suffered as a character without any other meaningful characters to bounce off or be realised through, just felt a waste of time. i can see why this show is popular and i suspect i might like s2 more based on speaking to friends but a huge amount of s1 seemed to be people cheering for an easy lunge at a zeitgeist that tells them things they already believed beforehand via a couple of stick figures and gif memes posing as television.

Godmother was a totally believable bitchy aspirant stepmother. I could imagine her doing the same thing my grandfather’s second wife did when we lost him two weeks before the family Christmas he always meticulously planned: sneakily taking all the presents he’d bought for his kids and grandkids back to the shops.

I found her character totally delightful and believable.

I need to rewatch the first season, I didn't realize it's been almost 3 years since it came out.

Teeth guy was the only thing I ever found to be a bit much

holy shit suzy that’s dreadful

the announcement, staging & reveal of the portrait she painted of Fleabag & her sister for the wedding was *chef’s kiss*

yup. I've accidentally taken some photos of my sons like that last weekend which has been cracking me up

Teeth guy was great, and asking for him (or the hot sex guy) to be more of a character might be the dumbest criticism of this show

Actually that's changed my mind. I hadn't realised it was great.

The dumbest criticism of the show is surely mine: in 10 years time we’re going to be faintly embarrassed to look back and have read so much into what’s regarded as a quaint, but entertaining, curio.

My cousin (who has inoperable cancer) loved both series and asked me ‘will there be a third?’

I was just about to hit send on a reply along the lines of ‘PWB says no but in a few years, if the right idea presents itself, maybe?’ but stopped myself for obvious reasons.

Actually that's changed my mind. I hadn't realised it was great.

right?

Teeth guy was great, and asking for him (or the hot sex guy) to be more of a character might be the dumbest criticism of this show

― abcfsk, Friday, June 7, 2019 12:17 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep, i agree, i think he's mostly justified by his final scene in the show, where he betrays the slightest self-awareness and then immediately tries to kill her guinea pig

the hot sex guy totally exists in reality imo

also realism is boring etc

yeah i mean i don't care for realism too much, a drama that has a world with its own internal logic is fine, but s1 was so deeply stupid and underwritten in almost every character/plot except a few fleabag monologues. ultimately she suffered as a character without any other meaningful characters to bounce off or be realised through, just felt a waste of time. i can see why this show is popular and i suspect i might like s2 more based on speaking to friends but a huge amount of s1 seemed to be people cheering for an easy lunge at a zeitgeist that tells them things they already believed beforehand via a couple of stick figures and gif memes posing as television.

― FernandoHierro, Thursday, June 6, 2019 3:36 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feels like this is a criticism of thinkpieces about the show and not the show itself but there's so much distance in this post it's hard to tell

hard to have coherent, strong opinions about a show you didn't watch.

i watched maybe four episodes of s1. it is possible for someone to not like something you like. possible and okay. i expected to like the show but i didn't. isn't that why we're here?

the last ep of season one is p crucial

i mean i generally agree that season two blows season one away but i like the way season one gradually reveals itself as a feedback loop of grief

realism is not what I'm asking for, plausibility is.

my only serious gripe, albeit a small one, is the total absence of Boo from the finale

reiterating my own point here, but I think the shallow characterization in the first season seems more intentional when you think of the point of view character being an unreliable narrator

at no point does she really take notice of anything other than surface impressions of most people and some characters are ridiculous because it's her version of them -- the hamster teeth guy is a dead giveaway because she's thinking of him as "that guy with the ridiculous teeth" so it's portrayed exactly that way

also the bit about him being a documentarian takes on a new dimension when you realize PWB's now-ex-husband makes documentaries