The Royale With Cheese Movie Club is a blog category where I finally get around to watching films that apparently everyone else in the world has seen. It was named after my finally seeing Pulp Fiction about 25 years after everyone else.
Of late, I’ve added a TV subsection to this blog category, so at some point when I actually watch The Sopranos or The Bear or Only Murders in the Building, I can add reviews of those shows to this blog channel.
And today, I’m recounting an Amazon Prime show called Fleabag.
Let’s start off by noting that this is NOT a show for kids. It’s not about an animal with fleas, or anything like that. Apparently Fleabag (if that’s the character’s name) is a 30-something single woman obsessed with sex and relationships. Maybe an even NFSW’er version of the characters from Sex and the City.
Fleabag is a London cafe owner with a dysfunctional family and a dysfunctional relationship life. She talks directly to us (the viewer) while the show’s main storyline airs. It’s like a potty-mouthed version of the stage play Our Town.
But here’s the twist. Over the show’s twelve episodes, we discover more and more about Fleabag’s motivations. How much effect the outside world has on her and her decisions. And in watching the show, it stops feeling like a sex romp and turns more into a psychological drama – with Fleabag giving us nods and winks like she knows that we’re watching her in her most intimate and vulnerable moments.
Apparently this show won a ton of Emmy Awards in its short existence, and lead actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge kills it with her presentation of a deeply complex, flawed and vulnerable main character. But once again, be prepared for plenty of adult language and adult situations in the series. And also keep an eye out in Season 2 for someone called The Priest (yep, like most characters in this show, bereft of a surname) who enters Fleabag’s life and brings his own influence into her social situations.
I did enjoy Fleabag, and it does give me more of an impetus to try new (to me) and different streaming shows that everybody else loves. I mean, I could deep-dive into other programs that I haven’t tried yet … maybe that show about the dead people that walk, or the handmaids that tell tales, or the one about the football coach that runs a soccer team, or that one about shrinking or the one about succession or the one about severance …
Yeah, this might open up a brand new line of blogs. And some decent TV time.
Chuck The Writer 