What Fleabag's 'hot priest' storyline gets so right about sex and love

A perfect show somehow got even better with its (surprisingly hopeful) second season

A scene from Fleabag.
(Image credit: Steve Schofield)

It was hard to imagine, at the end of Fleabag's first season, how there even could be a second season.

Built around some of the most comedically devastating fourth-wall breaking this side of The Office's Jim Halpert, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's "Fleabag" played a woman-as-trainwreck stereotype, a shameless relationship-killer whose life symphonically spiraled out of control, punctuated by self-destructive sex and burning bridges. And yet she did it so charmingly, so hilariously, that it could be easy to laugh and overlook how wounded and grieving — and ashamed — she actually was. The more she self-destructed, the more indestructible she seemed. And this, as it would turn out, was exactly the point of constantly mugging to the camera, of all the joking asides, smirks, and wry commentary she tossed off as we watched her barrel through her life: to confess everything except the thing that mattered, the one thing she needed to hide.

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Aaron Bady

Aaron Bady is a founding editor at Popula. He was an editor at The New Inquiry and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Pacific Standard, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, California.