Fleabag season 3 is FINALLY on its way!
SIKE! Here are some recommendations to fill that season 3 shaped void instead.
A Fleabag lives in all of us, in some shape or form. We see a part of ourselves mirrored on the screen in front of us: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s daring writing of this woman trying to navigate life and making a mess of it. We have all made mistakes before. We hadn’t seen anything like it before and to see such a realistic, gritty portrayal finally make its way to mainstream media, it’s no wonder it became a fan favourite.
Fleabag very famously only has two seasons, despite fans crying for another since season 2 was first released in early 2019. Serena Davies, Head of Culture at The Telegraph, proclaims it a “near-perfect work of art”1 and rightfully so. Five years after it’s initial release, I still think about Fleabag from time to time: how she is doing and what she would be up to? Is she still running the cafe? How are things with her sister and dad? Did she ever see the Hot Priest again? Did she find what she was searching for?
As much as I would love to return to Fleabag’s world, I know that we shouldn’t. It’s a bittersweet goodbye, but Waller-Bridge says she might return to her when she is 45 to 50. For now Fleabag has to live a little2 and she cannot do that with us watching her. I agree with her, and not just because I’m scared how she is going to continue forward, even though I’l love it anyway.
After having rewatched it more times than I care to admit, I find searching for Fleabag in other mediums. Books, films and music, you name it! So, fellow Fleabag, here is my list of very niche recommendations I have collected over time. I hope they inspire a love story of your own.
Literature
The Original Screenplay & The Scriptures
The first and very obvious recommendation on this list is to read the original screenplay and the scriptures.
They built the foundation of the TV series (with the Scriptures being the screenplay of the TV show). They are short reads, around 57 to 95 pages depending on your edition. The Scriptures is obviously longer: my edition is 407 pages.
Fragile Animals by Genevieve Jagger
Fragile Animals is the debut of Genevieve Jagger, a queer writer and witch from Scotland. Published only in April 2024, this novel is hot of the press and is still gaining its readership.
This novel slowly engulfs you — and you won’t realise it until you are already in its mouth, halfway down its throat. The novel’s pace is a lot slower than the show as Noelle is pretty introspective from the beginning. She regurgitates memories and flashbacks of her childhood and religious upbringing throughout her time in Scotland to the point where you feel like you are looking at an exhibition.
Why are you telling us all of this? Why are you oversharing? No matter how she tries to suppress it and run away — it is haunting her and is refusing to loosen its grip. And yet I couldn’t stop reading. There is something so addicting about seeing her confess to herself, to us. Much like Fleabag constantly addressing the camera, constantly acknowledging us.
Perfect for: chasing the high of season 2’s love story, those who liked the push-pull dynamic of sexual suppression and religion, antiheroines.
When an ex-catholic woman develops a sexual relationship with a vampire, she is forced to confront the memories that haunt her religious past.
Struggling to deal with the familial trauma of her Catholic upbringing, hotel cleaner, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. There, she meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession. But as talk turns sacrilegious, and the weather outside grows colder, Noelle struggles to come to terms with her blasphemous sexuality. She becomes hounded by memories of her past: her mother’s affair with the local priest, and the part she played in ending it.
Bridging the gaps between contemporary gothic fiction, queer fiction and magical realism, Fragile Animals lures readers into Noelle’s loose grasp on her world and immerses them in some of Scotland’s most harsh and claustrophobic environments.3
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
Is the perfect pick for this list. Irina and Fleabag have things in common: their destructiveness and innate sexual appetite.
Irina is struggling. She is struggling in her job, in her life, in the relationships with those around her, with her photography career. Until she gets — what she hopes to be — her big break.
Yet the more we read, the more we recognise Irina’s destructive patterns and unreliability. The writing mirrors Irina’s mental state, sometimes it it perfectly sound, painting moving sequences of the bustling Newcastle city centre before your eyes. Other times, I found myself rereading and rereading passages again because I struggled to make sense of what was happening. Of how cruel the world was to Irina. The writing suddenly became disjointed and I felt like I was reading a different book entirely.
Clark, however, calls it “baby’s first transgressive fiction4, which I love because she is right. Before Boy Parts, I had not read anything like this — fellow North East writer Jessica Andrews comes the closest, but genre is what separates these two writers. Clark’s and Andrews’ descriptions of growing up an artist in working class Northumberland.
After Boy Parts, I cannot think of any piece of art that has come close. Perhaps A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers, about the spirally descent of a food critic turned cannibal. BookTok definitely hadn’t read anything like it, clutching their pearls and the same Colleen Hoover abuse stories tightly to their chest.
Fleabag began as a play and Boy Parts (Clark’s debut) got its three years after it publication. Adapted by Gillian Greer and starring Aimée Kelly (Wolfblood fans rise up!), the one woman adaptation of Boy Parts ran for just over a month last autumn in Soho Theatres.
Perfect for those who love: the darkness of the original screenplay, spiraling protagonists, unreliable narration.
Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle.
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best-friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention…
Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.5
You can read my Goodreads review of Boy Parts here.
Films
Past Lives (2023) — dir. Celine Song
Watching Past Lives whilst my period was due to start was definitely an experience. I remember zoning out, having it play full blast in my headphones whilst my partner watched Amadeus (1984) next to me, with his speakers. Once our respective films had finished, we turned to each other: him, giddy and me, sobbing.
Nora (Greta Lee) and Haesung (Teo Yoo) feel very Fleabag and Priest coded—especially the famous *trigger warning* ‘It’ll pass’ bus stop scene, which parallels the scene where Nora, Haesung and Arthur (John Magaro) are drinking in a bar as the film begins to conclude.
Destined to meet, destined to pass. Like Nora and Haesung, Fleabag and Priest did not have enough ‘injun’ for them to be together in this lifetime. We ignored this, as did Fleabag, throughout the second season and as their relationship continues to flourish. We forget that the Priest is a man of God and what this means. We forget that the Priest/Haesung and Nora/Fleabag lead very different lives and cannot be together. We forget this until it is too late to save ourselves and Fleabag from this modern day tragic love affair.
It is also interesting to note that “the central storyline involving the hot priest was entirely new and written specifically for TV”6.
If you love and weep over the ‘right person, wrong time’ theme as much as I do, here is my work-in-progress list of films that will crush your heart when you need to feel something.
I Used to Be Funny (2023) — dir. Ally Pankiw
If it stars Rachel Sennott, I am sat. Bottoms (2023) was one of my favourite 2023 releases and I watched Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) recently too. Rachel Sennott is a rising star and one to keep your eyes on.
I Used to Be Funny uses comedy to deal with heavier subject matter, much like Waller-Bridge’s writing.
Though I have yet to see this and therefore cannot comment fully, the early reviews and writings I have read seem to have some similarities to Waller-Bridge’s series.
Music
Why can’t I find the music from the credits anywhere?
This is my roman empire. I have searched high and low across the many seas of the Internet (Google and Reddit) for an answer and … I could not find one.
So.
Isobel Waller-Bridge, Bruno Coulais, BBC and Amazon if for some reason you are reading this: I am begging! PLEASE! Put the score on Spotify or on some music streaming service!
Ahem. Okay. In all seriousness, I assume it is due to copyright that it isn’t anywhere but YouTube. Despite it originally airing on BBC (our public streaming service which has a duty has to provide content for everyone), Amazon currently own the rights to it.
Here are some of my favourite Fleabag inspired playlists:
Thanks for reading! I am trying to get back into the swing of writing again. Though I want to return to creative writing, I am worried that burn out will char the new creativity I have found in hiatus. For now, I think I’ll stick to personal and opinion pieces on my current interests.
Love from,
Hannah