Fleabag: Ten Years On & It Still Feels Like a Quiet Revolution

(Prefer to listen than scroll, here is the audio version of the blog. Read by Jacquie Sarah, so expect warmth, humour, and maybe some mistakes.)

When Fleabag first aired on 21 July 2016, it did not feel like a television event. It was six episodes on BBC Three, a channel that was available on BBC iPlayer at the time. It wasn’t shown on a main channel (BBC2) until the following month. Fleabag, adapted from a one-woman show by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, about a woman making terrible decisions while talking directly to the camera. Hardly the sort of thing that screamed: “This will permanently alter television comedy.”

And then it did.

Not overnight. Not in the huge, shiny way prestige television often announces itself. Fleabag spread more like a secret people urgently needed to tell each other about. “Have you seen this?” quickly became “you have to watch this.”

Part of the reason it landed so hard was timing. Television had certainly featured messy women before. But messy women were often still required to be morally educational. Their mistakes had to teach them something neat and satisfying by the end of the episode. They could be chaotic, but only within acceptable boundaries. Fleabag wandered in covered in emotional bruises, making terrible choices, saying the wrong thing constantly, weaponising humour against intimacy, and somehow still making the audience love her.

Not because she was perfect.

Because she was recognisable.

That was the trick of Fleabag. It understood something many shows still struggle with now. Empathy and likability are not the same thing.

Fleabag herself can be selfish, manipulative, impulsive and cruel. Claire can be emotionally repressed to the point of frostbite. Their godmother, later stepmother, is narcissistic, passive-aggressive and emotionally vampiric in a linen jumpsuit. Even their father, sweet in his own fumbling way, spends most of the series avoiding conflict so intensely that he practically disappears inside his own kitchen.

And yet none of them feel like cartoons.

The show allows women to be contradictory in ways television often denied them. Funny and grieving. Cruel and loving. Intelligent and catastrophic. Fleabag can make a joke moments after revealing emotional devastation because that is often how real people survive unbearable things. Humour in the series is not there to soften pain. It exists alongside it.

That is why the fourth wall works so differently in Fleabag too.

Breaking the fourth wall was hardly invented by the series. Television comedy has been doing it for decades. But usually the audience is in on the joke. A wink. A reaction shot. A conspiratorial “can you believe this idiot?” Fleabag transformed it into something far more intimate.

The audience became her coping mechanism.

Every glance to camera acts as emotional deflection. She turns to us when she cannot sit fully inside the moment she is experiencing. We become her shield from vulnerability. The comedy comes from it sometimes, yes, but the deeper function is loneliness. She performs herself for us because performance is easier than honesty.

Which is why one of the most devastating moments in the entire series is when the Priest notices.

The “Hot Priest,” played by Andrew Scott, could easily have become a gimmick or internet obsession without substance. Instead he became one of the most unexpectedly tender love interests television has produced. Not because he fixes Fleabag. He absolutely does not. But because he sees her.

Really sees her.

He notices the disappearing act. He notices when she slips away into those private conversations with the audience. For the first time, somebody interrupts the performance.

Even though the relationship is doomed.

Not because they do not love each other, they do.

The second series understands something many romantic stories avoid: love is not always enough to overcome who people fundamentally are. The Priest cannot stop being a priest without losing part of himself. Fleabag cannot continue using humour and performance to avoid genuine connection if she wants to grow. Their relationship matters precisely because it cannot last.

That final bus stop scene remains one of the most beautiful endings television has produced because it refuses melodrama. No huge declaration. No manipulative tragedy. Just acceptance. Grief. Affection. And finally, movement.

Then comes the moment that quietly broke half the audience emotionally.

Fleabag looks towards us one last time and tells us no.

Not cruelly. Almost lovingly.

Throughout the series, we have been her emotional crutch. The person she performs for instead of truly processing her life. By the end, she does not need that mechanism any more. She walks away from the camera because she can finally exist without turning herself into a story.

The audience loses her because she no longer needs saving.

It is honestly difficult to think of another ending that trusted both its character and audience that much.

Of course, Fleabag is not just a love story. In many ways, the central relationship of the entire show is between Fleabag and Claire.

Television often struggles with sisters. They tend to become either best friends in matching pyjamas or enemies ripping each other apart for plot purposes. Fleabag and Claire feel painfully real. Their relationship is built on shared history, private language, irritation, obligation, guilt and fierce love.

Claire spends most of the series appearing more “together” than Fleabag. She has the career, the marriage, the control. Yet underneath it is somebody just as trapped and frightened, only expressing it differently.

What makes their relationship so moving is how protective Fleabag actually is. Beneath all the chaos and selfishness, she watches Claire constantly. She wants Claire to be happy long before Claire allows herself to admit she is miserable.

One of the great achievements of the second series is allowing Claire her own emotional awakening too. Her airport run towards Klare may be the most rom-com moment the show ever attempted, but it works because it feels earned. Claire finally choosing herself becomes just as triumphant as anything Fleabag experiences.

Then there is the symbolism threaded through the series, particularly in Series Two.

The fox.

A lesser show would probably explain the fox repeatedly appearing around the Priest. Fleabag wisely does not. The fox becomes emotional atmosphere rather than puzzle-solving. Anxiety. Pursuit. Instinct. Desire. Something wild that follows him everywhere no matter how hard he tries to ignore it.

Like faith.

Like love.

Like Fleabag herself, perhaps.

That restraint is part of why the series endures. Fleabag never overexplains itself. It trusts the audience to sit in discomfort, ambiguity and contradiction. It allows silence to matter as much as punchlines. It understands that comedy and heartbreak are not opposites. Often they are roommates sharing the same horrible flat.

Ten years on, you can see Fleabag’s fingerprints everywhere. More female-led comedies willing to embrace emotional complexity. More direct audience intimacy. More stories allowing women to be flawed without treating them as cautionary tales.

But very few have matched what Fleabag actually achieved.

Because underneath all the acclaim, memes, priest discourse and awards, the series did something deceptively simple.

It looked directly at grief, guilt and loneliness without ever losing its sense of humour.

The first series especially is not simply about a chaotic woman making bad decisions. It is about somebody trying to outrun devastating grief and the unbearable guilt attached to it after the death of her best friend, Boo. Fleabag jokes, deflects, performs and sabotages because fully sitting with that pain would mean facing what happened and her part in it.

That is why the comedy cuts so deeply. The humour is not there to distract from the sadness. It exists because of it.

By the end of the series, Fleabag has not magically fixed herself. Life is still messy. Relationships are still complicated. But for the first time she allows herself to move forward honestly instead of performing her way around pain.

Ten years later, Fleabag still feels quietly revolutionary because it understood something television often forgets.

People do not need characters to be perfect.

They just need them to feel human.

Agree or disagree? What did I miss that also added to the beauty of Fleabag? Let me know here.

You may also like:

Too Smart to Laugh? Are We Too Media Literate for Sitcoms Now?

Have audiences become too media literate for sitcoms, or are writers just getting lazier? A sharp look at modern comedy, AI, revivals, and why familiar still works.

Victoria Wood: The Standard We’re Still Trying to Reach

Ten years after her death, Victoria Wood’s influence on British comedy is still unmatched. A personal reflection on her work, her writing, and why we’re still trying to catch up.

Ten Sitcoms Every Comedy Writer Should Watch (Plus Three I Couldn’t Leave Out)

If you want to write comedy, start here. Thirteen shows that changed the rules and what you can steal from each one.

View more posts by clicking here.

Comedy Through the Cracks

A free exclusive PDF essay.

If life keeps cracking at the edges, you might as well laugh at the draft. Comedy Through the Cracks is my short, honest take on why comedy endures — and why we need it when we’re one awkward moment away from combusting.

Download it here to remember why humour endures (and why we need it more than ever).