Fleabag: a hilarious sitcom about terrible people

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sitcom is full of people who are defeated and unlikable - including her own character who masturbates to Barack Obama speeches. But it's utterly riveting.

Review: Fleabag, BBC Three, episode 3

There is a hint of some character development towards the end of the third episode of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's excellent series. Jogging through a graveyard Fleabag suddenly seems to see the world in a different way. Could she be heading for a happy ending?

Fleabag is an unflinching, clever look at tricky youth

Head to iPlayer now and learn to love an anti-hero who is just as clueless, skint, horny and selfish as the rest of us.

Fleabag: modern life is rubbish is BBC3's newest comedy

Greedy. Perverted. Selfish. Apathetic. Cynical. Depraved. Just some of the adjectives that the titular Fleabag uses to describe her life in the opening episode of this new BBC3 sitcom and over the course of the half hour, she definitely manages to tick the boxes on all of the above.

Fleabag: a gloriously rude update of Bridget Jones

Is eye-popping female sex comedy your sort of thing? If not, best look away now.

TV preview: Fleabag, BBC Three

Why do some TV comedies work while others fail to hit the mark? Don't ask me. If I knew I'd have a better job than this. Is it the writing? Is it the casting? Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and starred in C4 houseshare comedy Crashing and now BBC Three's Fleabag, and while the first one whiffed a bit the latest one is the real deal.

Flowers, which ran through the week on Channel 4, was a true hen's teeth rarity: we were witnessing, I think, the invention of a new genre. I'm just not sure quite what it was. Thorny, yes, prickly and awkward. Bleakly black too. Resoundingly human and truly funny. Above all, the singular vision of show runner (and writer and director and co-star) Will Sharpe, an Anglo-Japanese former Footlights president. What I do know is that I could have watched it all year long.

There were elements of Roald Dahl and Japanese anime, of Black Mirror and of Alan Ayckbourn, of fairytales for children who drink. Essentially the tale of a depressed writer and his savagely dysfunctional family, as the week wore on it became more forgiving. It's a sign of good drama when there's strength in depth of casting, and there were relishably chunky cameos for Angus Wright and Anna Chancellor as the true grotesques of the piece. But the family itself, the Flowers, survived near fatalities and worse to emerge, if not triumphant, then hugely and recognisably normal.

Olivia Colman, now forgiven the occasional misstep in The Night Manager, was back to all her charm and glory. We have grown used to seeing Colman in full-teeth mode, but she'd obviously been hiding a seventh set: no one else can hiss the accusatory "blabbermouth" while still blinding the world with a smile so wide nor so full of brittle self-doubt. Then there was Daniel Rigby as the son who bores everything but the pants off women, and Sophia Di Martino as sis Amy, the tender fulcrum around which much revolves. Above all, Julian Barratt as father Maurice, who conjures worlds of depression from just a pocketful of mumbles. The sadly salient point came on Thursday, when Deborah (Colman) attempted to reach the heart of Maurice's depression: we can fight it, she says, fight the monster together, maybe just with love. A shaggy shake of a sorrowful head. "No. Love just makes it worse." Truthfully, a week-long gem.

From what I can best deduce from the first two episodes of Flowers, writer Will Sharpe is attempting to create some sort of British version of Arrested Development. He's certainly taken elements of the American show most notably a family full of eccentrics led by suicidal children's author Maurice (Julian Barrett) whose family pile is in the middle of the countryside. Maurice is married to Deborah (Olivia Colman) who is constantly trying to put a brave face on things despite having a husband who doesn't love her and two emotionally repressed children. Maurice and Deborah's twins Donald and Amy (Daniel Rigby and Sophia Di Martino) are both in love with their neighbour Abigail (Georgina Campbell) however both don't quite know how to show it. There are also a gaggle of characters surrounding the Flowers family including a sort of manservant played by Sharpe himself and Abigail's awful plastic surgeon father George (Colin Hurley). What Flowers was missing for me was a sort of proxy for the audience to show us how truly awful the family are, similarly to what Jason Bateman did in Arrested Development. But Sharpe failed to create any sort of normal character and therefore I struggled to relate to anything that happened to this catalogue of quirky arty types who didn't seem particularly well-drawn to me. Even the set pieces of the first two episodes, notably Deborah and Maurice's engagement party and the death of Maurice's mother, did little for me as their use of grotesquely-drawn humour has been done better elsewhere most notably in the work of Steve Pemberton and Reese Shearsmith. Despite the fact they were ill-served by a script that thought it was a lot cleverer than it was I felt the cast did well regardless. Olivia Colman did as much as she could with the material she was given and I at least found her character tolerable in small doses. Additionally I felt that Georgina Campbell did well in portraying the only normal character of the bunch in Abigail and I thought if she'd been more prominently placed in these first two episodes I may have watched more. But by the time Maurice's mother had snuffed it at the end of the second episode I felt my time to depart the Flowers family had come as well as they'd struggle to make much of an impression on me over the hour that I'd spent with them. Although there were small flourishes of promise in Sharpe's writing, I felt he over-egged the pudding too much with his characters being too over-the-top to care about and the situations far too outlandish to ever buy into.

What we're watching: Flowers

Have you been watching Flowers, Channel 4's excellent new dark comedy drama? If not, we highly recommend you give it a try.

Georgina Campbell interview

Georgina Campbell is fretting that Olivia Colman will think she's a stalker. "I'm following her around," she tells me, laughing. She's referring to the actresses' joint-billing in both Channel 4's new comedy Flowers and Broadchurch's third series.