For the past two years, I have thought often about I Hate Suzie, a British dark comedy about a mid-level celebrity reeling from scandal. The series, co-created by the Succession writer Lucy Prebble and mesmerizing star Billie Piper, is claustrophobic and electrically candid, as Piper’s Suzie responds to the leak of intimate photos with combustible emotions delineated by eight episodes – shock, denial, fear, anger, among others. It’s a show that runs hot – as in, the scorching grip of anxiety – and visceral, the camera usually hugging close to Suzie’s face or that of her best friend/co-dependent agent Naomi (Leila Farzad).
In particular, I have thought about the fourth episode, Shame, the most brain-searingly interior chapter of a show that always has one foot in Suzie’s frenetic, self-lacerating, constantly overcompensating psyche. Most of the 34-minute runtime goes toward a trip through Suzie’s mind as she tries to make herself orgasm in the midst of a shame spiral. Suzie stays in bed in blue leopard print pyjamas (other than a brief interlude to find a vibrator and scrounge up some batteries); we travel through her horny stream of consciousness, through car-sex fantasies and childhood baggage, channel-surfing through past faces. Naomi acts as guilty conscience, delivering cut-glass observations on Suzie’s inability to locate her own desire. It’s a strikingly honest and evocative depiction of female desire, both as a portrait of one woman’s labyrinthine mind and as a depiction of inextricability of social norms from private imagination. Contemporary shows such as I May Destroy You and Sex Education have also explored the intractable knots of female desire, shame and male-dominated media, but I had never seen anything like it on TV before.
In press for the show’s second season, a three-episode “anti-Christmas” special that premiered last month, Prebble has lamented how few Americans have watched the show. So let me take up the mantle: watch I Hate Suzie, a televisual achievement of how it feels to be in one woman’s brain. I Hate Suzie Too (as the pitch-black sequel is called) has accurately been described as a panic attack in television form; the feeling is unrelenting, absorbing, gloriously rendered anxiety in the prison of the public eye.
The three-episode arc – Prebble has attributed this to budget and logistical constraints, though I choose to see it as sage concision in today’s bloated TV landscape – spans the cultural wasteland of a celebrity dance competition. Having lost her marriage, her agent and primary custody of her son after the photo hack, Suzie elects for public redemption through a run on Dance Crazee Xmas. Her instincts are both good – the muscle memory of a child star, as Piper was – and wildly off from the jump; we open in her first dance number, gyrating on stage in a skin-tight black leotard with a garish bow and sad clown makeup. The sound cuts between Suzie’s interior rhythm count – for all her flaws, she knows how to lock in – and understandably tepid applause for a performance that’s more primal catharsis than charm. Her shrieking is choreographed, though given everything the character went through last season, it also reads as release.
It doesn’t last. Suzie is voted out first and, in a cortisol-raising single take, bombarded off-stage with reactions, demands and embarrassment – publicists, assistants, her agent, the news that her bitter ex-husband’s tell-all tabloid interview has gone live. Cue the season’s audial motif: the high-pitched hissing of a tea kettle, or a brain one degree away from immolation.
The second season manages to make the at times excruciating stress work through its depiction of an anxiety spiral not as a smooth descent but a fight, multiple parts of the self scrabbling for control. Suzie, as played superlatively by Piper, can be self-destructive, annoying, an emotional vulture; she also loves her deaf son Frank (Matthew Jordan-Caws) desperately and finds temporary reprieve through the structure of dance practice and the playful spark with her older first husband (Douglas Hodge). She’s flighty yet ruthlessly competitive on a C-list dance show.
She also can, on occasion, take care of herself. In a standout first episode flashback scene, we witness Suzie’s medication abortion, the most common abortion method that is still extremely underrepresented on screen. Alone in a room, Suzie waits for blood, queries a comically unhelpful chatbot, waits more. There are the repetitive rips of soaked sanitary pads removed from her underwear, implied minutes on the toilet, and a final unceremonious disposal of clotted blood. Television history overwhelmingly suggests that such a plotline would factor into Suzie’s unraveling, but Prebble’s writing is slyly subversive; the scene is a standalone act that isn’t referenced again. The experience is uncomfortable, annoying, painful, boring, a little surreal and ultimately not haunting – one of the best abortion depictions I’ve seen on TV.
It’s fitting for a show that has a firm grasp on the complexities, pressures and contradictions of a woman’s mind even as its protagonist veers into full breakdown. I have quibbles with the reputation-annihilating ending, which layers on excruciation and pain a little too thick for the point of our enduring fascination with public breakdowns a la Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse. But one cannot dispute both Piper’s tour de force performance and the believability of the Suzie she inhabits. Even in distress, in a risible dance competition, she has gravitational pull. Here’s to hoping there’s enough viewers for a chance to see where she lands.
I Hate Suzie Too is available on HBO Max in the US and on Sky TV in the UK
This article was amended on 5 January 2023. The abortion scene in I Hate Suzie Too took place in her sister’s flat and not in a hotel room, as an earlier version said.
