Roush Review: Saucy, Caustic ‘Fleabag’ Returns for an Addictive Final Season

Fleabag
Review
Amazon

Nobody breaks the proverbial “fourth wall,” stealing looks at and making snarky cracks to the camera, with as sly a wit as Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The writer and star of saucy, caustic comedy Fleabag (and creator of the equally terrific Killing Eve), plays the eponymous but otherwise unnamed Londoner who, as she tells a therapist (Fiona Shaw), “spent most of my adult life using sex to deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart.”

As usual, she underestimates herself, and in the addictive second (and unfortunately final) season, Fleabag just might be losing her heart to, of all things, a potty-mouthed priest (the charmingly roguish Andrew Scott). He gets her so completely that he calls her out when she turns away from him to address her audience. “Where did you just go?” he demands. (That never happened with Shakespearean asides.)

Crackling with intelligence but consumed with regrets and issues with her broken family (which includes the ubiquitous, and wonderful, Olivia Colman as her poisonous stepmom-to-be), this neurotic Fleabag is an audacious marvel.

Fleabag, Friday, May 17, Prime Video