Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag launched on BBC Three in July 2016 and won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for its second season in 2019, alongside the BAFTA for Best Female Comedy Performance. The series consolidated Waller-Bridge, who had developed the original character in a 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe one-woman play, as one of the most internationally consequential British comic-dramatic writers of her generation.

The series follows a sharp, self-destructive thirty-something woman in London (Waller-Bridge) (never named within the series) navigating grief, sex, family dysfunction, and a slowly disclosing personal history. The structural conceit is that she breaks the fourth wall with confessional asides and direct-camera looks throughout the episodes, an intimate connection with the audience that the show progressively complicates. Sian Clifford plays her elder sister Claire; Olivia Colman, Bill Paterson and Andrew Scott (the latter introduced in the second season) anchor the supporting ensemble.

Waller-Bridge's writing (sharp, distinctly unsentimental about female interiority, willing to hold morally uncomfortable beats) produced one of the most-cited British comedy series of the late 2010s. The second season's central romance and Andrew Scott's performance as the priest were widely covered as one of the moments of British prestige television in 2019. Waller-Bridge has continued primarily as a writer-creator since (Killing Eve, the unproduced No Time to Die material).