Hacker Cinema
Fleabag
2016 · TV series · 2 seasons
Created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
A portrait into the mind of a dry-witted, sexual, angry, porn-watching, grief-riddled woman, trying to make sense of the world. As she hurls herself headlong at modern living, Fleabag is thrown roughly up against the walls of contemporary London, with all its frenetic energy, late nights, and bright lights.
14 positive3 negative1 neutralfrom 18 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
One of the most under-appreciated lines from a TV show was from Fleabag season 2
"Priests CAN have sex, you know. You won't just burst into flames. I've Googled it!"
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
Didn't know that the original Fleabag Edinburgh show was funded on Kickstarter.
The video is worth watching if you've seen it/the TV adaptation: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drywrite/fleabag
Fleabag is not a strong independent Girl Boss either, the problem is bad writing and poor characterization which has a lot of broader industry factors. Gig-style inconsistent writer employment, lack of streaming royalties, shorter seasons, shutting writers out of film shoots, they all screw up the junior -> veteran pipeline and produce more immature and unpolished writing.
Today, bad writing manifests as bad expressions of today's predominant values because that's what people grow up with, just as bad writing in the past would badly express the past's predominant values.
Also 90% of stuff is crap and we only remember the good stuff from the past.
>2 critically acclaimed TV shows
I tried to watch them.
My opinion is that they were critically acclaimed because the subject matter was popular or outrageous not necessarily because they were good. There aren't any sympathetic characters in fleabag - its a tale of a mentally unstable desperate neurotic woman as she goes from revolting situation to revolting situation through bad decisions she's mostly at fault for. It isn't funny. If you giggle when unlikable people talk about anal sex this may be for you.
Killing eve was a tv show that embodies "mid" in every way, except its about lesbian/bisexual bait so it wins awards.
>Solo, Indiana Jones 5,
Solo was a bad movie and the first star wars film to actually lose money, and indiana jones 5 hasn't been released yet so I'm withholding judgement.
>Taking into account the number of episodes she wrote for both of these series, she actually has more writing credits than her 3 credited NTTD co-writers.
Writing 1000 episodes of those shows isn't comparable to a single good bond film. This is why quantity and quality are not the same.
>A story credit is given to a writer that participated in writing the treatment for the film (i.e., the outline), in situations where a treatment is drafted before the script itself is written. A story credit is a lesser credit in Hollywood.
Ya, the other writers have writing credits, and story credits, and 20 years of history writing bond movies.
>Where there is overlap between the story by and screenplay by credits, it means that the original writers' first draft(s) weren't filmable and another writer had to be brought into salvage the script.
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/heres-how-phoebe-waller-bridge-polished-the-no-time-to-die-script-1202213218/
>“[I was asked to do] dialogue polishes and to offer things really,” she said. “It’s about just offering different alternatives.”
>She went on to say “they did give me some scenes and then be like, can you write some alternatives for this or have another idea about where it could go in the middle or how it would end. And then I would just give them options and various scenes and then they would take what they want. But there was a lot people writing — the director [Cary Fukunaga] was a writer on it as well. And there’d been a few writers before.”
They didn't bring her in to salvage the script at all. They brought her in to do polishes of dialogue and to give them some ideas about how things could go and they'd take what they wanted. What about this reads salvaging?
She got the invited because one of the film's producers, Barbara Brocolli, invited her to contribute. in my opinion because they were looking to add female writing credits to the movie as the academy awards had suddenly introduced diversity requirements to be considered for awards and all the writers up to that point were men.
phoebe waller bridge has a single credit of interest for writing
This says more about your tastes than your understanding of Hollywood.
Ms. Waller-Bridge wrote 2 critically acclaimed TV shows which were hits for their respective distributors: Fleabag (an Amazon Video launch series), and Killing Eve (BBC). She also wrote several smaller series for the BBC, and co-wrote No Time to Die, and provided uncredited rewrites for Solo, Indiana Jones 5, and is currently working on another TV show for Amazon.
For her work on both Fleabag and Killing Eve, she was nominated for outstanding writing by her peers (and won for Killing Eve). Taking into account the number of episodes she wrote for both of these series, she actually has more writing credits than her 3 credited NTTD co-writers.
doesn't have a story credit unlike the other three writers
A story credit is given to a writer that participated in writing the treatment for the film (i.e., the outline), in situations where a treatment is drafted before the script itself is written. A story credit is a lesser credit in Hollywood. Where there is overlap between the story by and screenplay by credits, it means that the original writers' first draft(s) weren't filmable and another writer had to be brought into salvage the script. Some writers will re-write enough things to get sole credit for the final script; others, like PWB, will make just the changes necessary to get it across the finish while still letting the original screenwriters get credited for their contributions.
Some American comedy (Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99, Cheers, Community, etc) is amazing. Most of it is crap (2 1/2 Men, Big Bang, 90% of SNL, 100% of "middle aged dude with a family and a wife that's way too good looking" sitcoms).
Some British comedy (Fawlty Towers, Black Books, Fleabag) is amazing. Most of it is crap (Mr Bean, Keeping Up Appearances, One Foot in the grave).
There are some terrible British bands, and some great French cars.
Generalising about culture is pointless.
> What recent (non-animated) funny movie or show have you seen that is not "feel good" or filled with sexual jokes?
I don't really watch comedy films but I watch a reasonable amount of comedy shows:
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Avenue 5, Fleabag, The Good Place, Silicon Valley, Resident Alien, Barry, Home (UK), Mythic Quest, AP Bio, Tacoma FD, Ted Lasso, Russian Doll, Veep, You're the Worst, Better Things·
I'm not sure what your qualifier for "recent" is so feel free to ignore some of those.
Sure a lot of these aren't farces like Airplane or Scary Movie but it's not all feel good or dick jokes. There is plenty of comedy out there for all types of tastes.
If you want good content go watch the following TV shows (if you haven't already):
- Euphoria
- Bojack Horseman
- Atlanta
- Fleabag
I really liked Fleabag. Maisel seemed too pretentious, watched only 2 or 3 episodes. Maybe should try again.
I think Amazon take it less seriously than some of the others. For Netflix, streaming is their entire business. For Disney, HBO and Hulu, it’s the future - they’d probably rather stick with the old school cable TV, movie theatres, etc. model, but they can see the writing on the wall, and they aren’t going to let streaming take them down. But for Amazon ... it’s more just a perk to package with Prime shipping. They want it to be solid, but it’s always going to be very small for them compared to e-commerce, AWS and their platform for 3rd party sellers, fulfilment, etc. Prime Video revenue is similar for them to their co-branded credit cards, I think?
I actually think they have some great content, and a pretty decent app. Their “originals” especially are pretty great - Fleabag, the Boys, the Expanse, all excellent. But yeah, the quality of the app is a bit lower than some of the others, and they have a lot less content than Netflix, because Prime is really not a main focus of their company, more of a nice add-on.
Plenty of shows can be good with just one or two seasons, and more is worse. Freaks & Geeks: 1 season, amazing. Ditto UK The Office. Fleabag: 2 short seasons, amazing. The OA: AMAZING first season with a complete coherent ending, then they had to make a bizarre, scattershot second season. Ditto Killing Eve (how many damn times can she get killed lol). Downton Abbey: PLANNED for 3 seasons (pre, during, & post wwI) but it was so popular they just rambled on for ages until it looked like the scripts were being pulled directly from tumblr ("beloved character came back from america! for a wedding episode! plus: PUPPIES!!" literally).
So I don't totally get the "cancelled too soon" argument. The OA should have not run to even 2 seasons.
There's a trend of not producing art or even something original, but producing "content." For example someone asked me if The Mandalorian is good. "It's star wars Content" I replied. "If you like star wars, and want Content, you'll like it." Is the plot novel? Is it original or compelling? No, but boy it's fun to see yoda puppet and more Content from the SW universe you've come to know and love!
A lot of these series may have run their creative course & while megafans want more "Content" it's the same thing as something being cancelled too soon, and most people aren't megafans.
Interesting tidbits:
- 150 million amazon prime users globally (equivalent to to combined france + germany population (or) half of US population). Impressive!!
- Rivian is integrating Alexa into its electric vehicle lineup, including its upcoming fleet of 100,000 all-electric Amazon delivery van. Amazon has made investments in Rivian. Going to compete with Tesla?
- Amazon Music has more than 55 million customers worldwide. Collectively, in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan, Amazon Music customers have grown nearly 50% year-over-year;
- Prime Video received eight Golden Globe Award nominations, with Fleabag winning Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy, as well as Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy, for Phoebe WallerBridge.
- AWS announced three Arm-based instances (M6g, C6g, R6g) powered by AWS’s new Graviton2 processors, that deliver up to 40% better price and performance than current x86 processor-based instances. Threat to intel?
- AWS announced the general availability of AWS Outposts, a fully-managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. On-premises is gaining strength?
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/f3589a21-d023-4e4c-9897-1498c60885d2
The films and shows that are "streaming-only" in 2019 are the equivalent of "straight-to-DVD" in the 00s.
Besides marquee projects like House of Cards, Fleabag etc, the vast majority of original programming on these networks are badly made formulaic pap with actors no-one's ever heard of. Were it not for the recommendation algorithm (and the removal of the user reviews), I doubt anybody would bother watching them.
As I get older, I have had a harder time losing myself in many forms of passive entertainment if I can see the author's - for lack of a better word - schtick.
So, with games, movies, books, music and even paintings - if I my brain picks up the process first and isn't impressed or curious by that aspect, I lose interest. This is mostly common with movies and games, where the cost and expanse of the created world often require some level of formulas/trope. It is the inverse in a lot of music, where I am fascinated by the process and production a lot and can appreciate it at both levels more. Similarly with great TV - recently I watched season 2 of Fleabag and realised I was lost both in the story telling and in wonder/amazement at it's construction and execution.
Before full time work and a kid, there was a certain amount of time I could afford to lose myself in another person's creation, but nowadays if I start seeing the scaffolding, I can't unsee it. For this reason I am also starting to be drawn back to the sciences. I sometimes worry that I am finding it hard to relate to a lot of art and human expression because of this, so I try to 'lose' myself in it - but so much art (and predominantly so many games) require a lot of scaffolding.
Interested if anybody else can relate and share how they deal with this.
Breaking Bad spun off Better Call Saul, which I really hope they wrap up in Season 5. The Americans and Justified are two other shows that ended when they should have. Fargo is a fresh story every season, so it can probably go on a bit longer. Fleabag was a perfect two season show.
Agreed -- makes me think of the Fleabag example.
Think it's much easier for people to consume 25min chunks across 2 seasons (6 episodes each) than a full-length film.