10 Greatest Original TV Heroes Of The Last Decade
3. ‘Fleabag’: Fleabag (2016-2019)
Short-lived though this series may be, the universal critical praise heaped upon it, combined with a list of awards to rival any of its contemporaries, global distribution and being no less a figure the former US President Barrack Obama’s favourite show of 2019, makes this as much of a cert for this list as any longer running show.
In an industry just beginning to show the embryonic signs of coming to terms with its historically poor representation of women in leading roles, Fleabag offers up a peerless representation of, drum roll please…an actual human woman. Not a sexually appealing trophy to be paraded in front of men, not a flawless super-powered model, not an implausibly badass gun toting secret agent type but an actual, normal, human woman in a starring role. God, what a breath of fresh air this was.
Based on a one woman show of the same name, Phoebe Waller-Bridge took the Edinburgh fringe festival by storm with her portrayal of the unnamed ‘fleabag’; a mixed up, sexually frustrated every woman just trying to muddle through under the weight of her own expectations of what a well adjusted woman should be like in contemporary Britain.
Waller- Bridge can be hysterically funny at times, but without ever feeling like she’s delivering scripted jokes and the slow unveiling of the characters past trauma lends enormous gravity to someone firmly planted in our world, rather than the augmented worlds of lesser script writers. One can only hope that her iconic performance leads not only to greater representation for normal women on screen, but to a great many more female writers bringing their voices onto our screens in the coming decade.
What struck a note with so many is that the show never seeks to deliver any kind of message or forced morality into the protagonist’s journey. Its good, old fashioned, entertaining voyeurism is informed by stand out performances and clever, witty dialogue. You just don’t meet people who are “meh” about Fleabag; either they haven’t seen it or they rave about how it was one of their all time favourite shows.