Fleabag: "Season 2, Episode 1" and "Season 2, Episode 2"

(This is the fourth installment of my weekly recaps of  Fleabag, the Prime Video series that aired two seasons in 2016 and 2019. I love the show, and I wrote these reviews in 2020 when exploring the idea of doing a paid version of the newsletter. As such, they don't have all our regular features, but I hope you enjoy them anyway. These recaps are only available to paid subscribers.)

"Season 2, Episode 1"

My friend and colleague Dan Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter named this episode of Fleabag as the best Fleabag of season two, and his justification for that choice was that this tightly constructed half-hour of television is an almost peerless example of TV comedy writing.

I am hard-pressed to disagree. This premiere sets up a scenario in which the characters have not seen each other since the events of the first season finale and it sets up that Fleabag’s life has gotten somewhat back on track and it introduces a brand new important character (the Hot Priest) and it tells a slamming doors farce that somehow involves a miscarriage. It does it all without breaking a sweat. That’s great TV writing!

Of course, there are few better opening moments in television than Fleabag, nose bloodied, helping a similarly injured waitress, then turning direct to camera to say, “This is a love story,” before flashing back to show us just how Fleabag came to have that bloody nose. Instantly, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has introduced twin sources of suspense in the form of “How did Fleabag get a bloody nose?” and “A love story? With whom?”

Yet this opening moment is also divine because of the way it plays with our expectations surrounding the show. In the first season, Fleabag’s direct address to camera was a cool trick and a way to show off Waller-Bridge’s ability to flit micro-expressions across her face in what feel like milliseconds, all while perfectly allowing the audience to read her every emotion. In the second season, these quick asides to camera become something else entirely: quite nearly a vice.

Future episodes will deal with the question of just what’s going on with the camera in more nuanced fashion, but I love how disciplined this first episode is about letting Fleabag take her time in turning to see us again (it takes a surprising amount of time if you can remember how frequently she was chatting to us near season one’s end). What’s more, the scene where Fleabag runs down the list of vices she’s given up and changes to her life she’s made early in the episode is so pointedly directed at the camera that you find yourself wondering, well, okay… does Fleabag need to give us up, too? (Maybe you didn’t ask yourself this, but I sure did.)

Beyond that, though, this episode really is a terrific chance for Waller-Bridge and Harry Bradbeer to show off how thoroughly they understand very basic principles of comedy. In this case, they take the family dinner play – a hoary old theatrical genre in which an entire family gathers for dinner and either has all its secrets exposed (if you’re in a drama) or tries valiantly to keep secrets from being exposed (if you’re in a comedy) – and twist it on its ear with all of these characters we know so well and one we don’t (who is, it should be said, very hot and charming).

We also get a subtle reminder that this series is, ultimately, about the bond between Fleabag and Claire. Why haven’t we seen her all this time? Well, Claire’s been away in Finland, and this is the first time the two have seen each other since Claire left. And the script twists the knife even more when we learn that Claire disappeared to the bathroom to have a miscarriage – and then when Fleabag says that she, actually, had the miscarriage. Both sisters maintain their odd relationships with boundaries, but exaggerated to incredible degrees.

All this and the most famous jumpsuit in all of television? Yeah, this is one of the best TV episodes of 2019, of the 2010s, maybe ever. But is it the best episode of the second season? I don't think so. Fleabag season two is just getting started.

"Season 2, Episode 2"

If I have a criticism of Fleabag season two – and I don’t, really – it’s that the compressed number of episodes means essentially speeding the show’s way through Fleabag falling in love with the Hot Priest, action that is largely confined to this episode. On a lot of shows, the lack of time spent on building that relationship would have hurt everything that followed. Fleabag makes it work, and it’s instructive to see how it accomplishes that.

Much of this is thanks to Andrew Scott’s superb hotness, to be sure. There’s a crackling cheekiness to him that compliments his cheekbones, making it easy to see just how he went on to become the internet’s boyfriend for a couple of weeks. And a lot of it is also due to the way Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays falling in love – she makes it seem like Fleabag is a farm animal being dragged toward a corral, unable to resist what’s happening to her but also a little pissed off about it. He’s a priest, after all. But he’s hot (aside to camera: so hot).

Waller-Bridge herself has attributed the way the Hot Priest became a phenomenon to the fact that the character listens to Fleabag, really listens. She’s said that men could learn something from this, and undoubtedly so. But what sets Scott’s performance apart here is the way that he listens with his whole body. Even when the Priest is regarding Fleabag casually in his office, when he is in command of the space they’re in, there’s an openness to him. He leans back. He opens up. There’s a calm confidence to him that’s sexy, and then he doesn’t feel the need to speak every few words.

But I think this relationship also works because the Hot Priest is so different from Fleabag and from the show of the same name. The first part of this equation is easy to understand – opposites attract! But the second is harder to pin down, even as it’s a big part of why season two took off in a way season one did not. The Priest is at least nominally focused on questions of the eternal, of life and death, of all the hard stuff that Fleabag’s more in-the-weeds life doesn’t dare look at. The show nor the character it’s named after would ever abandon their flinty non-theism, but bringing in a character with such a different view of how the world is put together can only help but disrupt everything that’s been so carefully built.

It’s easy, in 2021, to dismiss religious and theological concerns, because we have the answers for most of the questions religion initially rose up to explain. But over the past few years, I befriended a pastor who is a closeted trans woman, and just having her in my life has shaken it up dramatically, because she refuses to let go of the idea that there is a reason behind the connections we draw with each other, even as embracing her identity cost her so much that she had built. Faith, ultimately, is just as much in other people as it is in God, that if he is somewhere, pulling strings, then he is bringing the right people into your life at the right time.

Thus what shakes up Fleabag – and Fleabag – about the Hot Priest isn’t what he says. It’s who he is: the answer to a question neither she nor the show thought to ask.

Next week: My pick for the best episode of season two and the show overall. Take that, Fienberg!