The Fleabag effect is, thank heavens, still with us. People recoil at the term because it is usually used negatively – to suggest that the airwaves have been flooded since with derivative versions of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit. But in a more positive sense, the Fleabag effect can be said to be the one it had on TV commissioners’ minds. It proved that there was a market for intelligent, women-centred, women-led stories and an appetite for comedy dramas about as dark as you could make them.
And lo, pitches that a few years earlier might have drawn aghast looks before being chucked in the nearest bin as too challenging, too bitter, too confusing, too female were instead brought to fruition. The likes of Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal, Aisling Bea’s This Way Up, Daisy Haggard and Laura Solon’s Back to Life and Nancy Harris’s The Dry ensued, combining meditations on poverty, mental illness, alcoholism, the ramifications of childhood and other trauma with an immoderate number of excellent jokes that are not necessarily designed to make you laugh.
