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And With That Final Episode, Fleabag Becomes The Finest TV Drama Of 2016

You know, they told us this was just a sitcom…

BBC3, the free online streaming TV channel (geoblocked to the UK I'm afraid) made Fleabag's final episode in the six episode series available today. And with that has made it the finest drama of the year, bar none.

Characters with the cunningest evil guile yet utterly defensible in their outlook, that makes Game Of Thrones look like Sesame Street. Oh yes, one of them happens to be Olivia Colman. Lovely, Olivia Colman. Until now.

This is the GBH, the I Claudius, the Abigail's Party, the Edge Of Darkness, The Wire, The Thick Of It, the Black Mirror of 2016. It will take every BAFTA that is waived in its general direction.

It's about a woman and her love life. Her sister and her marriage. Her father and his new wife. Her dead mother and her dead best friend. And that guinea pig – who is clearly not the only fleabag here. There are no angels, no dragons, no guns, zombies, no windswept Scandivanian landscapes, no buildings of state and empire, and no dystopic visions of the future. Just of the present.

I'd call it Girls meets House Of Cards, except that does it such disservice. The show cuts deep and what you think is a riotously tragic sex comedy spread its wings as well as its legs and brings in death, age, sisterhood, mourning, families, death again, the best pencil joke ever – and hamsters, all with the filthiest voice imaginable, and a Miranda look to camera to make us all co-conspirators to the breaking of people. And loving it.

Written and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge and based on her one woman stage show of the same name, she has had successes before – the series Crashing was a big hit for me on Channel 4 at the beginning of the year. But this is like Brass Eye to The Day Today. It is focussed, harrowing, full of despair but with some of the best jokes about genitalia in the business. We like her from the off. It takes us a while to work out why our instincts were bang on. Ridiculously good television.

And because it has been picked up by Amazon Prime in the USA, about to drop all six episodes in three weeks time, the Americans might even get to hear about it. That's where the Emmys happen, right?

However you find a way to watch Fleabag, do so. Six episodes, half an hour long each, that's an evening in. It drops on Amazon Prime on the 16th September. It's on the BBC iPlayer now. You literally have nothing better to do than watch this show.

Do it. Before you get bored by other people recommending it so much that you go off the idea. Be the annoying person who recommends it instead, that's much more fun.

But you're going to have to beat all these people to it…

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