“An immaculately scripted and performed half-hour”

Fleabag

Fleabag, BBC1

“An immaculately scripted and performed half-hour – certainly up there with the best of the first series, and probably up with the best of TV comedy-drama entire.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“After the success of Fleabag and Killing Eve, Waller-Bridge perhaps feels able to take more risks and move away from quickfire, audience-pleasing filth into the realm of claustrophobic tragicomic drama, where the excruciating silences say as much as the dialogue. Waller-Bridge hasn’t rested on her laurels and, like all the best writers, is offering something familiar yet intriguingly different.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“If you baulk at black humour about miscarriages, you won’t like Fleabag, no matter how many Baftas it swipes. And that’s a pity, because it means missing Olivia Colman at her phenomenal comic best.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Like the very best comedy, I find it almost unbearable to watch. I love Fleabag, but I would love it just as much without the jokes – though the jokes ease the pain down.”
Tanya Gold, The Telegraph

“What could have been just another film about alleged rape incidents on university campuses and a ‘moral hysteria’ in which some young men say they are victims of a new Me Too correctness gave us a dramatic twist delivered with Theroux’s classic lugubriousness.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“This was a contentious and difficult topic. But Theroux worked through it with thoughtful humanity.”
Helen Brown, The Telegraph

“Theroux can usually seem sympathetic to anyone, however creepy, but this time the look on his face said it all: Khan made his flesh crawl. It was no surprise to learn, at the end of the hour-long documentary, that Khan (although cleared in a criminal court) had been expelled from Yale and may face deportation.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“As the film progressed it seemed less like an investigation into attitudes surrounding consent and more like the careful unveiling of a sociopath. By the time Theroux noted to Khan that ‘we’ve heard a lot about what you liked but I don’t recall you asking her what she liked’, the gloves were off.”
Sarah Hughes, The i

“This an incendiary, troubling, and compelling documentary. Why this film, now? Why, when there has been a steep rise in the reporting of campus sexual assaults? Why are we near 15 minutes into an hour-long investigation into what constitutes consent before we hear from a female victim?”
Chitra Ramaswamy, The Guardian

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