Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag soars to new heights in Season 2

Rolling Stone

"Among Fleabag’s great joys is its ability to be gut-bustingly funny while exploring its main character’s very real and obvious suffering," says Alan Sepinwall. "That gift is on ample display from the season’s first minute to its last — an even more clear farewell from the character than the one we got last time. Each moment has the potential to veer from slapstick to tragedy, or vice versa. This often happens, in marvelously graceful fashion. Waller-Bridge is even better than before at using the direct address in the most efficient (and often hilarious) way possible. Despite the long absence, the characters are all so finely-etched, and played so well by the whole ensemble, that it takes no time at all to remember why nobody gets along, despite mostly good intentions. And because we’ve now spent so much time in her company, Fleabag’s failures and her triumphs resonate even more deeply than before, in a way that lets the season surpass the first on many levels."

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• Season is thrillingly deep, funny, and buoyant: "In it, Waller-Bridge ransacks every trick in artistry’s store, availing herself of violence, pratfalls, fart jokes, flashbacks, witty repartee, sex scenes, tears, trauma, cute animals (depending on how you feel about guinea pigs and hamsters), and a total mastery of her characters to build a bang-up romantic comedy, not just in the narrow genre sense (though it is great example of the genre) but a larger one too, examining a number of very specific, ineluctably loving relationships in all their funny, sad, twisted forms," says Willa Paskin. "In the opening scene of the new season, as she’s wiping up her bloody nose and wearing—of course—a smashing jumpsuit, Fleabag cuts her eyes at the camera and explains, 'This is a love story.'"
• That Season 2 is so successfully additive and so satisfyingly final in its conclusion feels like a minor miracle
• Fleabag refuses to let any of its characters fall into predictable tropes, rounding out the antagonists as fully as the protagonists
• Fleabag is unmissable as a feat of dark comedy delivered with a kind of panache that is utterly fresh -- it is also very, very British
• Breaking the fourth wall can be a crutch, but in Fleabag the device shows as much as it tells
• Andrew Scott doesn't mind being called a "Hot Priest"
• British viewers bought 2,200 of the black jumpsuit Phoebe Waller-Bridge wore in Season 2