Fleabag review: An old-fashioned setup given contemporary clothing

Like avocado on toast, lifestyle podcasts and stationary bicycling, Fleabag has become one of the sine-qua-nons of British millennial life. Since the opening scene of the first episode in 2016, in which the eponymous lead character, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, rubbed one out in bed watching an Obama speech, the programme has been praised for its frank depiction of contemporary womanhood. Fleabag drank, smoked and shagged around, punctuating her pathological selfishness with dry asides to camera.

It was a winning formula, funny but bleak, with the destructive consequences of narcissism laid bare. If women found the character “relatable” that was not necessarily something to shout about, just as it didn’t say much about the men who related to Mark and Jeremy in Peep Show, which is to say all of us. By the end of the series, Fleabag’s life, and those around her, were more or less in tatters.

In the three years since, Waller-Bridge has become a superstar, or nearly one, via Solo: A Star Wars Story, in which she voiced a sassy droid, and Killing Eve, the two-hander about a beautiful assassin and the MI6 agent on her case, which Waller-Bridge adapted from novels by Luke Jennings. As a result, this second series of Fleabag is one the most anticipated of the year, after the Game of Thrones finale.

The first episode, an audacious set piece that takes place almost entirely at a restaurant, is equal to the weight of expectation. In the opening scene, Fleabag wipes the blood from her nose in a bathroom, and helps a woman on the floor with a similar sanguinary predicament. This is a love story, she tells us. It is too pleased with itself as an opening, and if Fleabag has a flaw it is that its supreme self-assurance sometimes spills over. The action cuts back to the start of the evening. Fleabag’s father (Bill Paterson) has convened the family together for a “gangbang”, as he says, unaware of that word’s newer connotations. The event is ostensibly to celebrate love but there is little on display.

The dinner-gone-wrong format hammers home that for all its contemporary flourishes Fleabag is an old-fashioned programme at heart, part of a noble tradition of laughing at the aristocracy. While they might dress like everyone else, Fleabag and her ghastly family are firmly upper middle class. Lacking any kind of emotional toolkit, the father writes cheques, or in this case a voucher for therapy, where his heart can’t reach.

The godmother (Oscar-winner Olivia Colman) is in denial about her vacuous art career. Claire, played with immaculate froideur by Sian Clifford, is cracking up but trying to hold it together, insisting she is a banker rather than lawyer. Her husband Martin is a lecherous alcoholic. To this mix we know from the first series is added a priest, played by Andrew Scott, whose wild vowels and eyes are as expressive as ever.

While there are plenty of well-turned one-liners, the deeper attraction of Fleabag is schadenfreude. The moments of connection, as between Claire and Fleabag in a taxi at the end of the episode, are the bleaker for their rarity. All their material abundance can’t save these people from their misery. In the case of the daughters, it actively seems to cause it. Fleabag wants to have money without working for it and meaningful relationships without thinking of anyone aside from herself. Fleabag is as old as Daisy Buchanan or Lydia Bennett or Scarlett O’Hara. The best compliment to Waller-Bridge and her cast is that they find fresh clothes in which to dress these ancient monsters.