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For "Fleabag" Fans

If you're not watching/obsessed with "Fleabag," stop here. If you *are* watching, please note:

 *The further in I get, the more I see that this is a study of shame. Fleabag did something truly bad. She involved her friend's boyfriend in some extracurricular activities. What's worse: The despair the friend then felt led to the friend's (semi-)accidental death.

Is it always possible to forgive yourself? If not, how do you manage your shame? How do you continue to make a regular appearance in the world? And how do you separate the things you're responsible for....from the things you're not responsible for? These questions are the show's main preoccupation (beneath the tit jokes and the discussions of masturbation).

 *This is a show about siblings. It's a study of two fucked-up adult sisters, which also feels somewhat unusual in the Amazon Prime world. The two main sisters in "Fleabag" love and loathe one another. (A writer recently said, "Without a roiling current of ambivalence, you really don't have a story to tell.")

I love that each of the two sisters is a mess in her own bizarre way. And I love that one sister symbolically "took on" the other sister's miscarriage. The invented miscarriage was a way of moving the plot forward; it was a way of disrupting a terrible dinner. But I also see a metaphor here--a symbol of the love these two train-wreck humans feel. If you're my sister, and you have a miscarriage, then that's *my* miscarriage. Such smart and beautiful writing.

 *This is a show about the obtuseness of men. A very handsome man says to Fleabag, "I thought I wanted to stay with you. I love that your tits are so small. It's like they're not even there. It's like you're a sexy plank.....And I couldn't stand my other girlfriend, my real girlfriend. Her tits were just too big. But something about you freed me. You freed me to be with two big tits. And so I am leaving you..."

This, like much of the show, is goofy and absurd--but it's also a dead-serious commentary on what it means to be alive in a world populated by heterosexual men. Take your rage, your indignation--and make art. I'm still so in love with this piece of writing and its author.
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