Latest news with #Fleabag
Metro
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
BBC drama that 'perfectly encapsulated grief' celebrated by fans 9 years later
It's been almost a decade since Phoebe Waller-Bridge's groundbreaking BBC drama Fleabag offered one of the most poignant explorations of grief on TV. The Emmy-winning show started as a one-woman show at Edinburgh Fringe Festival before making the leap to the small screen in 2016, with the first episode airing on July 21. The fourth-wall-breaking show stars Phoebe as the titular Fleabag who is navigating the complicated and sudden loss of her best friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford). As she navigates this trauma, we meet the people who make up her small, and chaotic, world, including her uptight sister Claire (Sian Clifford), her snooty stepmum Matrigna (Olivia Colman) and, later on in the show, the man she falls in love with but can never have – Andrew Scott's (Hot) Priest. The two-season comedy has built a loyal fanbase over the years and, with its regular inclusion in people's favourite shows of all time, it is also constantly being discovered by new viewers. Praised for its wit and surprising depth, fans are reminiscing on just what made the show so good – from its fundamental understanding of bereavement to its ability to flesh out flawed characters. During one scene, when Fleabag is describing the heaviness of Boo's loss, she explains: 'I don't know what to do with it. With all the love I have for her.I don't know where to put it now.' Sharing this moment on X, user @moralgrey simply wrote: 'When fleabag perfectly encapsulated grief.' Another user, @weirdnelipit, added: 'genuinely, my favourite one was this whole boo and fleabag conversation after her mom died, 'Like it sparked a new layer of understanding of grief & all of our unconditional love for someone & the closest people we have will always be on our side.. a love that will always remain.' 'Thank you Fleabag for one of the most beautiful depictions of grief,' chaoticguitar echoed. 'Fleabag summed up a lot of the grief we feel after a loved ones death in this scene,' Layal Shakeir agreed. Over on Reddit, fans were in agreement about the show's impact. User sgt-snuggles wrote: 'I didn't truly see it on first watch but Fleabag really has such a unique and real portrayal of grief. When I rewatched it after losing someone close I felt like I was seeing it through different lenses. 'The desperation to be close to people while pushing away real closeness, the fear of confronting how everything truly feels, it's so real and beautifully shown in such a deep yet silly manner.' 'The spiraling, confusing, messy grief is so well displayed in Fleabag with Boo. It's cold and snowy out, so I'm going to make beef stew and watch Fleabag and cry and drink wine,' soup-creature echoed. This was not the only moment fans were profoundly moved by. For many, the highlight of the show is the portrayal of sisterhood in all its messiness, and more importantly, all its unconditional love. 'I'm so grateful for the depiction of Claire and Fleabag's relationship — the ugliness and heartbreak and enormity of love and care. how different they're & how they choose to stick with each other,' @apparitionow said. In one scene, Claire tells Fleabag that she's the only person she would run through an airport for in a bid to do a grand gesture (typically reserved for romance). 'Portrayal of the sibling relationship in Fleabag still remains one of my favourite aspects of the show. As someone who has always struggled to verbalise her love for her sibling, this bit was like a eureka moment for me,' d_majumdar92. Other highlights include the heartwrenching exchange in which Fleabag confesses her love for Priest, only to be told 'it'll pass'. Or when Priest is the only one to 'ask her a question in 45 minutes'. Or when he's the only one who can break the fourth wall with her. For @alison_epp, these moments were an 'absolute surprising and beautiful way to show someone truly being seen'. More Trending Another fan shared their love for the scene when Fleabag is talking with an older woman who has been through menopause, Belinda, who delivers a layered monologue about 'women being born with pain built in' and the freedom you find in your later years. If you haven't watched Fleabag, then let this new milestone be your sign to watch it. You won't regret it. View More » Fleabag is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: BBC's Celebrity Traitors is 'blowing a whopping £760,000 on cast salaries' MORE: Rob Brydon admits major blunder he made that almost ruined BBC series MORE: The most 'absurd' show on the BBC just dropped 6 new episodes
News18
a day ago
- Entertainment
- News18
'Why believe in something awful when you can believe in something wonderful?'
Pheobe Waller-Bridge's cult comedy show Fleabag turns nine today. Let us revisit the show with these memorable dialogues.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Girls gone bad: Lena Dunham's Too Much is just not good enough
There is one TV show that has been enjoyed most often, and most reliably, among my cohort in New York: Girls, the seminal HBO dramedy about Brooklyn's downwardly mobile and highly self-important creative class of the 2010s. Though a cultural lightning rod when it aired from 2012 until 2017 – its whiteness, convincing narcissism, frank sexuality and frequent nudity all catnip for the cresting blogosphere and cyclical moral panic – Girls has rightfully settled into its status as one of the best television series of the 21st century, a foundational text for millennials as well as a biting satire of solipsistic, Obama-era striving. (Although viewers too young to remember it as anything other than canon now see the girls' flailing – their freedom to wear terrible prints, listen to Vampire Weekend and be earnest – as something to be envied rather than derided, a core tenet of the millennial redemption arc.) The show was always sharper than tendentious criticism acknowledged, a knowing send-up not to be taken too seriously, though it did seriously shape the TV that followed – the idea of an 'unlikable' female protagonist was always ahistorical, but messy, compelling women on television proliferated in Hannah Horvath's wake, from the girls of Broad City to Insecure's Issa, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag to Pamela Adlon's Better Things. It is unfortunately still radical to see someone who looks like creator, writer and star Lena Dunham be naked on screen without judgment; though television has explored sex much more successfully than movies in the years since, no show has fully succeeded Girls' unvarnished vision of sex as something both banal and essential. No wonder so many people are rewatching it. All of which is to say: expectations were high for Too Much, Dunham's new TV series for Netflix. Though not her first project since Girls – she helmed HBO's ill-fated series Camping, made two feature films (one much better than the other) and directed the (excellent) pilot of Industry – Too Much is the first true follow-up to the show that made her a cultural flashpoint at the age of 26. From the jump, Jessica, played by the comedian Megan Stalter, appears as a natural successor to Dunham's annoying but subtly endearing Horvath. Once again in Brooklyn, Jessica does something headstrong and inadvisable: she breaks into her ex-boyfriend Zev's (Michael Zegen) apartment and screams him and his new girlfriend Wendy (longtime Dunham friend Emily Ratajkowski) awake, hysterically demanding that he declare leaving her to be the worst thing anyone has ever done. The amateur and ultimately futile home invasion is the first sign that Too Much will, like Girls before it, concern at least one prickly and off-putting character who is refreshingly and unashamedly not skinny. It is also the first sign that something is off. Whereas Hannah annoyed with a recognizable, skewering self-obsession, Jessica's Too Much-ness – shocking volume, machine-gun delivery, inherent awkwardness – is a gag. Stalter comes from the world of front-facing camera internet comedy, where heightened bits and jarring phrases reign supreme (her best work – 'hi, gay!' – will get stuck in your head for hours). The translation to television works in small parts, as in Hacks, but flounders as a lead, particularly one supposed to attract a handsome musician (Will Sharpe) at a pub and succeed as an advertising director while showing up to work in bunny ears. Dunham is now in her late 30s and married (her husband, the indie musician Luis Felber, co-created the show with her); no one will begrudge her avoiding a repeat of the Girls formula, which no show has been able to crack (Adults tried this spring, and failed). With Too Much, she steers far from any specific scene, instead focusing on the relationship between Jessica and Sharpe's Felix, loosely based on her own. The 10-part romcom features the welcome presence of Dunham's underrated acting, a buzzy lead in Stalter, a refreshingly grey vision of London, a murderers' row of cameos – among them, Andrew Scott, Naomi Watts, Stephen Fry and Kit Harington – and sensitive scenes between two weirdo lovers. But without a scene or a trope to satirize – Dunham, through Jessica, is thoroughly enamored by English romcoms from Pride & Prejudice to Notting Hill – its comedy falters. Long on grating gags and short on zingers, Too Much is, and I say this begrudgingly, an overlong and underbaked disappointment. It is, however, very much of its era in television, when the downsides of the streaming boom have come into clearer focus. Episode lengths for Too Much vary from 31 minutes to a baggy 50+, less evidence of creative flexibility than a resistance to editing. Like Jessica's favored nightgowns, the chapters are oversized and diaphanous, standard Netflix second-screen fare; some, such as the standout third episode depicting an accidental all-nighter punctuated by repeated, insistent sex as Jessica and Felix fall in love, believably advance their relationship with Dunham's distinctive sense of erotic realism. Others, such as a Jessica meeting Felix's friends and, true to form, doing too much ketamine, trap the characters in a cyclical loop of dysfunction. Dunham is, as the critic Lili Loofbourow put it, an excellent miniaturist – Too Much shines when the world falls away from Jessica and Felix, as they build the couple's secret language of bits, vulnerabilities and callbacks. But as soon as the show meanders – to some egregiously overdrawn co-workers, to Jessica's mother (Rita Wilson) on FaceTime across the pond, Dunham loses her grip. One scene, Jessica is getting a dressing-down from her boss (Richard E Grant) for her performance; the next, they're bingeing coke at a work party at his house. But perhaps most disappointing to me, as a fan of Girls, is the show's tenuous grip on the reality of the body. It is refreshing to see Stalter, a plus-size actor, play an unabashed character who generally gets what she wants, and whose romantic rivals are played by Ratajkowski, the epitome of conventional hot on Instagram, and the French movie star Adèle Exarchopoulos. It also feels a bit disingenuous to not acknowledge appearances at all, particularly when the culture is regressing back to the eating disorder-riddled 'thin is in' of the 2000s. During one early sex scene, Felix lays a hand on Jessica's bandaged stomach – always hapless, she burned herself – but does not grab her, as if he respects her curves, but does not crave her, as if they are beside the point of attraction. Such is the muted energy of Too Much, a show at once too broad and not enough. Dunham, once the tongue-in-cheek 'voice of a generation', has succeeded again – unfortunately this time, it's in making Netflix background TV.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Girls gone bad: Lena Dunham's Too Much is just not good enough
There is one TV show that has been enjoyed most often, and most reliably, among my cohort in New York: Girls, the seminal HBO dramedy about Brooklyn's downwardly mobile and highly self-important creative class of the 2010s. Though a cultural lightning rod when it aired from 2012 until 2017 – its whiteness, convincing narcissism, frank sexuality and frequent nudity all catnip for the cresting blogosphere and cyclical moral panic – Girls has rightfully settled into its status as one of the best television series of the 21st century, a foundational text for millennials as well as a biting satire of solipsistic, Obama-era striving. (Although viewers too young to remember it as anything other than canon now see the girls' flailing – their freedom to wear terrible prints, listen to Vampire Weekend and be earnest – as something to be envied rather than derided, a core tenet of the millennial redemption arc.) The show was always sharper than tendentious criticism acknowledged, a knowing send-up not to be taken too seriously, though it did seriously shape the TV that followed – the idea of an 'unlikable' female protagonist was always ahistorical, but messy, compelling women on television proliferated in Hannah Horvath's wake, from the girls of Broad City to Insecure's Issa, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag to Pamela Adlon's Better Things. It is unfortunately still radical to see someone who looks like creator, writer and star Lena Dunham be naked on screen without judgment; though television has explored sex much more successfully than movies in the years since, no show has fully succeeded Girls' unvarnished vision of sex as something both banal and essential. No wonder so many people are rewatching it. All of which is to say: expectations were high for Too Much, Dunham's new TV series for Netflix. Though not her first project since Girls – she helmed HBO's ill-fated series Camping, made two feature films (one much better than the other) and directed the (excellent) pilot of Industry – Too Much is the first true follow-up to the show that made her a cultural flashpoint at the age of 26. From the jump, Jessica, played by the comedian Megan Stalter, appears as a natural successor to Dunham's annoying but subtly endearing Hannah Horvath. Once again in Brooklyn, Jessica does something headstrong and inadvisable: she breaks into her ex-boyfriend Zev's (Michael Zegen) apartment and screams him and his new girlfriend Wendy (longtime Dunham friend Emily Ratajkowski) awake, hysterically demanding that he declare leaving her to be the worst thing anyone has ever done. The amateur and ultimately futile home invasion is the first sign that Too Much will, like Girls before it, concern at least one prickly and off-putting character who is refreshingly and unashamedly not skinny. It is also the first sign that something is off. Whereas Hannah annoyed with a recognizable, skewering self-obsession, Jessica's Too Much-ness – shocking volume, machine-gun delivery, inherent awkwardness – is a gag. Stalter comes from the world of front-facing camera internet comedy, where heightened bits and jarring phrases reign supreme (her best work – 'hi, gay!' – will get stuck in your head for hours). The translation to television works in small parts, as in Hacks, but flounders as a lead, particularly one supposed to attract a handsome musician (Will Sharpe) at a pub and succeed as an advertising director while showing up to work in bunny ears. Dunham is now in her late 30s and married (her husband, the indie musician Luis Felber, co-created the show with her); no one will begrudge her avoiding a repeat of the Girls formula, which no show has been able to crack (Adults tried this spring, and failed). With Too Much, she steers far from any specific scene, instead focusing on the relationship between Jessica and Sharpe's Felix, loosely based on her own. The 10-part romcom features the welcome presence of Dunham's underrated acting, a buzzy lead in Stalter, a refreshingly grey vision of London, a murderers' row of cameos – among them, Andrew Scott, Naomi Watts, Stephen Fry and Kit Harington – and sensitive scenes between two weirdo lovers. But without a scene or a trope to satirize – Dunham, through Jessica, is thoroughly enamored by English romcoms from Pride & Prejudice to Notting Hill – its comedy falters. Long on grating gags and short on zingers, Too Much is, and I say this begrudgingly, an overlong and underbaked disappointment. It is, however, very much of its era in television, when the downsides of the streaming boom have come into clearer focus. Episode lengths for Too Much vary from 31 minutes to a baggy 50+, less evidence of creative flexibility than a resistance to editing. Like Jessica's favored nightgowns, the chapters are oversized and diaphanous, standard Netflix second-screen fare; some, such the standout third episode depicting an accidental all-nighter punctuated by repeated, insistent sex as Jessica and Felix fall in love, believably advance their relationship with Dunham's distinctive sense of erotic realism. Others, such as a Jessica meeting Felix's friends and, true to form, doing too much ketamine, trap the characters in a cyclical loop of dysfunction. Dunham is, as the critic Lili Loofbourow put it, an excellent miniaturist – Too Much shines when the world falls away from Jessica and Felix, as they build the couple's secret language of bits, vulnerabilities and callbacks. But as soon as the show meanders – to some egregiously overdrawn co-workers, to Jessica's mother (Rita Wilson) on FaceTime across the pond, Dunham loses her grip. One scene, Jessica is getting a dressing-down from her boss (Richard E Grant) for her performance; the next, they're bingeing coke at a work party at his house. But perhaps most disappointing to me, as a fan of Girls, is the show's tenuous grip on the reality of the body. It is refreshing to see Stalter, a plus-size actor, play an unabashed character who generally gets what she wants, and whose romantic rivals are played by Ratajkowski, the epitome of conventional hot on Instagram, and the French movie star Adèle Exarchopoulos. It also feels a bit disingenuous to not acknowledge appearances at all, particularly when the culture is regressing back to the eating disorder-riddled 'thin is in' of the 2000s. During one early sex scene, Felix lays a hand on Jessica's bandaged stomach – always hapless, she burned herself – but does not grab her, as if he respects her curves, but does not crave her, as if they are beside the point of attraction. Such is the muted energy of Too Much, a show at once too broad and not enough. Dunham, once the tongue-in-cheek 'voice of a generation', has succeeded again – unfortunately this time, it's in making Netflix background TV.
Daily Mirror
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Nicole Kidman and Anna Wintour shine in star-studded Wimbledon final lineup
Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman and Vogue's Anna Wintour lead the stars in center stage in the royal box during Sunday's Wimbledon men's final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner Nicole Kidman and Vogue editor-in-chief Dame Anna Wintour lead the glamour in the royal box at Wimbledon's men's singles final on Sunday, capturing attention as they enjoyed the hotly anticipated match between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. Oscar-winning actress Nicole, 58, looked as chic as ever as she modelled a crisp white blazer and shirt, with her new blonde locks styled to perfection. The actress was pictured smiling and laughing as she appeared to be in an engaged conversation with fashionista Wintour, 75, who stayed true to her iconic style with dark oversized sunglasses, a floral-embellished dress, and a bold green statement necklace. The exciting day of tennis attracted a whole host of other notable guests too, including Keira Knightley, who sat nearby Nicole and Anna alongside her husband, James Righton, who is best known as part of the Klaxons. Keira, 40, opted for a clean, belted white ensemble complemented by black sunglasses and a classic pearl necklace. Meanwhile, her husband looked suave as he matched her summer vibe in a cream double-breasted suit and tie. Seated next to the loved-up couple were Irish actors Andrew Scott, 48, and P aul Mescal, 29, who recently starred together in All of Us Strangers. Scott, famed for his roles in Fleabag and Ripley, wore a beige light suit paired with gold-rimmed sunglasses. Meanwhile, Normal People star Paul, who is also widely known for Gladiator II, added a splash of colour with a patterned tie over a white shirt and dark navy jacket. The famous friends appeared to be having a great time as they were pictured laughing together and chatting with Kiera as they watched the match between Alcaraz and Sinner. Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey also made an appearance at the Grand Finale at Wimbledon today as he was seen laughing while chatting to legend Andre Agassi as he walked into the Royal Box. The How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days star, 55, was all smiles as he lapped up the sunshine centre court while dressed in a suave white three-piece suit complete with a green patterned tie. Matthew was joined by acting royalty John Lithgow as he took his seat at the event. Among the royal attendees were Peep Show's Sophie Winkleman and her husband, Lord Frederick Windsor, the latter being a son of Prince Michael of Kent. Sophie, who is officially styled as Lady Frederick, looked elegant as she modelled a vibrant green sleeveless printed dress as they arrived for the day's matches. Elsewhere, Kensington Palace confirmed the Prince and Princess of Wales would also attend the final. Kate Middleton, 43, patron of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, received a standing ovation on Saturday when she presented the women's singles trophy to Iga Swiatek, highlighting her continuing support for the tournament. On Sunday, Kate looked gorgeous in a royal blue dress as she attended the Wimbledon final with her husband, Prince William and their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis. Last year, Kate presented the Wimbledon men's final trophy to Alcaraz in her second public engagement since she announced her cancer diagnosis. And it was another scorcher today for attendees as temperatures climbed to 27°C in southwest London as excitement built for the match that would close out two weeks of thrilling tennis action. The royal box was full of excitement as it set the scene for a memorable finale between Spain's defending champion Alcaraz and Italy's world number one Sinner.
