Fleabag

But even the BBC is helping revitalise the Nazis, not sure what she could do to stay "pure" in today's tv environment.

also,

'You Know That Feeling When You Waste Time at Work Using an "AI" to Translate the Faces of Various Noh Masks on Phoebe Waller-Bridge?'
(an art project in honour of @robpalkwriter) pic.twitter.com/otZ7NAsmfN

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) October 3, 2019

amazon isn't impure, it's a toxic and endlessly exploitative authoritarian monopoly which has destroyed tens of thousands of businesses, created and profited from unregulated markets, and reduced working standards, all in service of a much-exaggerated and often hugely inefficient convenience to the customer.

you can also watch the show on IFC in the United States, I guess

she's hosting snl this weekend btw.

every entertainment company since the dawn of man has done whatever it can to reduce the amount it pays talent, I'm not sure that's here or there?

yes, netflix is just breaking new ground in how to do it in their particular industry

her SNL hosting is at least as objectionable as working with amazon tbh

blah

amazon isn't impure, it's a toxic and endlessly exploitative authoritarian monopoly which has destroyed tens of thousands of businesses, created and profited from unregulated markets, and reduced working standards, all in service of a much-exaggerated and often hugely inefficient convenience to the customer.

― ogmor, Thursday, October 3, 2019 1:39 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm. streaming services are all varying degrees of evil but prime is 1) varying degrees of evil 2) attached to a more evil apparatus

season 2 of fleabag is a masterpiece so like, whatever

we're *all* attached to the apparatus via AWS if nothing else, it seems silly to attack artists for getting paid. fight the real enemy imo

fight the real enemy imo

SNL

yes.

fight the real enemy imo

― Simon H., Thursday, October 3, 2019 8:05 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

how

Speaking of a backlash..

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/aug/29/fleabag-stage-theatre-show-phoebe-waller-bridge

lol, that piece is very dumb.
i saw the televised performance; it was good but served as proof of how skilled she and her team are at translating her vision to a larger audience. The show is a definite quantum leap forward.

there's one subtextual bit of that piece about how we write characters that are horrible people, and whether past depictions differ from the more contemporary due to our tolerances of what we allow in our fiction. 2013 still seems relatively contemporary, but from a writer working in cultural commentary I can see where there's some blanket changing of the rules that is in no way evenly distributed among people who have never read a thinkpiece

re: the show, I'm still on s1 but the slow revelation of what happened and why everyone keeps asking if she's okay is fantastic

how

lots of competing theories on this but pretty sure "tut-tutting creatives for signing with the incorrect godless conglomerate" can be safely ruled out

Which of the three millennial women describing how they felt about this work by a millennial woman would you say was the dumbest, Ulysses?

And when did you stop beating your three dumb millennial wives?

There isn't anything else in the article though - it's just a roundtable of three women discussing the play (and the TV series, and how things have changed in the last 6 years).

forks said that (I infer, from reading half of it) the structure and content of the Guardian piece were fruitless and unenlightening about the performed text. He did not say anything about the intelligences of the participants, nor about how their gender or age relate to their intelligence, nor that their age & gender should qualify one’s apprehension of their personal reactions.

(I’ve read smart things written by at least two of the participants. As a conversation in the bar, after a show, between folks who know each other, nobody comes off as fundamentally dipshitted. As a ‘printed’ article reflecting on the original play and how its context has altered since first production, it’s at best an 1/8th-arsed aide-mémoire toward writing up a roundtable.)

The structure is literally them talking - the content is literally them talking (I assume cleaned up in the usual ways, I'll grant it's not just tape recorder audio) - there isn't a distance between "this article is dumb" and "the participants are dumb".

Thread's taken an odd turn tbh.

Fair.

roundtables are inherently dumb no matter the participants

*King Arthur pauses, sadly deletes half-written post*

lol

smart people say dumb things all the time, particularly in round tables

I didn’t think anything they said was particularly dumb, but the central theme of the conversation took a route through examining how an intentionally offensive character monologue from 2013 was offensive in unintentional ways in 2019 and that didn’t feel fruitful.

Tbf that Guardian round table is extremely bad

I thought the discussion of how it feels like a cash-in, and how the intimacy of the original experience was lost (my immediate mental comparison was a "band plays their classic album in full" tour), was interesting.

That was the only good point, the rest is garbled and inane. The show is far more complex and interesting than the commentators were giving it credit for

Lol at DJP's post, yes to Brad's "round tables are bad" assessment, and yes exactly to mh's comments

I was laughing at this line:

I’ve just been at the Edinburgh fringe, where I saw 50 more exciting shows.

I mean, it might be gauche to drop names in a roundtable like this, but if other shows are worth going to and would hold appeal for this audience, NAME SOME!
That kind of phrasing -- and the following admission that the Waller-Bridge's show is probably pulling traffic to the West End that may not usually attend -- is recognition that the audience might not be fringe festival-goers and it comes off as "well, they're not REAL theater fans.."

Anyone who goes to 50+ comedy shows at the Edinburgh Fringe needs locked up, for their own safety.

I've had Nathan Barley on the mind lately and I immediately went to the scene where the presumably sympathetic character is trying to escape "cool" writing and get a job with a traditional journalism outfit and is trying to pitch a review of his favorite wines and all he comes up with is "French, Spanish..... South French.."

And agreed, people who like binging things at festival shows and people who will go to a one-off incredibly popular theater event have some overlap, but it's not the same demographic!

i kinda thought the Guardian group-chat piece was obviously banal on the face of it and that it didn't require much more explanation but, since you explicitly called me out on it Andrew, I'll co-sign sic (tho i did read the whole thing!) and fgti's assessments above.

That article trafficked in concern trolling ("There are several fat jokes. I was sitting next to a large guy, who was laughing, but I wondered how he felt"), poor frame-of-reference ("It was like MTV Unplugged"), faux-naiveté that self negates itself in the same paragraph ("The monologue is solid but nothing hugely special. And the staging is incredibly ordinary... when you think how many plays are struggling for a stage, it feels slightly unfair when the same thing gets done again. But then, has there ever been a one-woman show in the West End that has been so financially viable? ") and just generally added nothing to the conversation beyond coming up with some real bizarre talking points ("Also what complicates that moment is that Waller-Bridge has the perfect body" <- according to who?). I guess the big takeaway is that Waller-Bridge seems to be "cashing in" on her and her work's popularity by staging a play lots of people want to see? Isn't that how commerce works?

And yes to the suggestion that round tables are generally terrible reflections of writers' capabilities; they're mostly good for fast turnaround and for paying writers partial wages for more words. I'm unfamiliar with the work of all three off the participants in that piece and wouldn't label them as "dumb"; I put the blame more at the foot of the Guardian. It's manufactured backlash clickbait and not well edited.

Since you seem to be implying that I feel otherwise AF, I'll state the obvious here and note that while many millennials can and do write well (about fellow millennials and other topics too!), not ALL millennials can and do write well (about fellow millennials etc) and that being a millennial does not necessarily impart some meaningful insight to the whole of your generation's actions.

tbh there's probably a comedy vein that could be mined about woke millennials cautiously analyzing their surroundings and entertainment media for the correct sympathies and signs while dropping clunkers like "has the perfect body"

Dear Woke People

tbh my own brain has been poisoned by The Discourse which results in a condition where you're unable to have normal conversations where you've internalized new cultural norms and you're in a state of intellectual disrepair constantly hoping you're saying the right things

Well, yeah, the panellists seemed to be, at times, not criticizing the show on its own merits, or engaging with the complexity of its characters, but dissecting whether or not the play/show lived up to their own view of the discourse.

Stating that "a woman taking advantage" (Snapes) might've been written differently post-#MeToo displayed a real lack-of-awareness about the thesis of the show? The show is about people taking advantage, including (especially) Fleabag?

I read it again to make sure that I wasn't wrong that it was a really bad round table, and I'm not wrong. I wanted to scream: she is supposed to be fallible. Did you miss the part where she accidentally kills her best friend by fucking around too much. Did you see the part where her best friend was the only healthy relationship in her life.

Maybe the show is way more simple than I made it out to be, but I don't think it is? I think it's a really complicated and critical show?

And to answer the question "when has there ever been a one-woman show on the London West End that has been so financially viable" like you've seen 50 shows at Edinburgh Fringe but you've never heard of Shirley Valentine?

I didn't watch the first season until recently, and most of the good analyses I read-- in particular, the Kathryn VanArendonk piece for Vulture-- were about the second season. I didn't read any good analyses of the first season, which, to me, had a lot to unpack. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

The problem with any discussion about something that's very popular and already critically acclaimed, let alone a stage show that spawned a successful television series, is the inherent premise that whatever you're watching is good. So you're stuck with tangents about whether it's of its time, or if it holds up after a beloved descendant television program.

The unstated premise I was left with is that the stage show is, in fact, good. People enjoyed it. The large man (!) laughed.

hah, I posted that before your comment, fgti, but it's another angle on the same thing! season two reviews are viewing season one through season two glasses

Season two is generally considered better because it's written for TV - season one landed well because even a well-regarded Fringe show isn't going to be seen by nearly as many people as a TV show in a decent slot - I don't think I've seen anyone saying "I saw the stage show and the first season was better" - which is an obvious angle to send some appropriate people to look at the stage show and discuss it.

I remember this review at the time, which is more straightforward and less thinkpiecey:
https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/09/23/fleabag-is-the-egocentric-comedy-heroine-of-your-dreamsnightmares/

well if you count the televised National Theater as "seeing the stage show," I saw the stage show and the first season was better! Like way better!

Good write-up!

I'm very, very curious about Fleabag's relationship to promiscuous sex. The "best sex of Fleabag's life" scene-- the 55 year old man pounding her while she gazes at the camera-- was shocking to me; mostly because I was sitting there wondering how important, in this scenario, was "the gaze of the audience"? How much of sexuality, to the promiscuous among our ranks, is performative? Idk I have so many questions