Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: billie piper, doctor who, I Hate Suzie, i hate suzie too, Lucy Prebble

I Hate Suzie Too: Billie Piper's Feminist Scream from the Heart

I Hate Suzie Too is a perfect anti-Christmas special at Christmas time. It's only three episodes serving as the second season of Billie Piper's self-lacerating, intensely personal comedy-drama about a TV star going into a public and private meltdown. In season one, Suzie Pickles' career and personal life are blown up by a scandal. She will do anything to stay relevant, a celebrity in the public eye, and keep custody of her son after an ugly divorce from her embittered husband (Daniel Ings).

In I Hate Suzie Too, Suzy's life gets even worse, much of it through her voluntary actions. As her husband brings the worst, meanest divorce proceedings against her, Suzie agrees to appear on "Dance Crazee," a grotesque dance competition that's the most popular show in the country featuring fading celebrities. She does it to stay in the public eye and be paid enough to afford her custody proceedings for her son. She patches up her friendship with her best friend and now ex-agent Naomi (Leila Farzad), who is trying to get pregnant, but everyone is too caught up with their own shit to really care about that. She also reunites with her first husband (Douglas Hodge) on the show, who's still in love with her. Suzy, perpetually on the verge of a meltdown and full breakdown, rediscovers her artistic outlet in dancing, but is forced to stick to the traditional images of feminine sexiness while she wants to dance as a menacing clown. Suffice to say, everything that she shouldn't do, she does, and all the terrible things that could happen do happen, and it's horrible for her, but both horrible and hilarious for us.

Co-creator and acclaimed playwright Lucy Prebble, who is also a writer on HBO's Succession, layers nearly every scene in I Hate Suzie Too with both tragedy and comedy at the same time, including the opener where Suzie takes an abortion pill to get rid of the unwanted pregnancy she ended up with in the finale of last season. That sequence alone is a declaration of intent from Prebble and Piper that they have no limits or F's to give on this show. There has never been a scene depicting abortion like this in any show or movie before, and there never will be again. It's made its point about the practical and matter-of-factness of abortion for viewers to make of as they will.

I Hate Suzie Too is Brilliant But is Billie Piper Okay?

As we watched I Hate Suzie Too, we start to worry for Billie Piper. We want to ask if she's okay. The show uses our knowledge of her own public history, plucked from drama school – or performing arts high school, as Americans would call it – at the age of fifteen to become a pop star, burned out and recovering from addiction by the time she was nineteen, considered a joke when she was cast as the companion in the revival of Doctor Who in 2004 when she was in her early twenties, only to surprise the entire nation by first proving she was a great actor and becoming a TV star in the process, then going onto be considered one of the finest actors on television and the stage. Piper has not had it anywhere as horribly as Suzie Pickles has. Still, she seems to have spent years thinking about the industry and its treatment of women, and the general sexism and misogyny of society in general, and how that affects female celebrities.

Suzie Pickles is narcissistic, as most celebrities are, but the world made her that way. She is more sinned against than sinning, and when the world throws more knives at her, she picks them up and stabs herself even more with them. Billie Piper's career is going great now, but she's created and played Suzie Pickles as a victim of the entire world and her internalised self-hatred. This show could be a kind of exorcism ritual for Piper, planned and executed with Prebble's equally uncompromising script. It's a world obsessed with Celebrity, and everyone is both a victim and perpetrator in it. To stay relevant and keep any sense of self-worth and identity, Suzie Pickles has to keep degrading and traumatizing herself to feel she's worth anything in the world. It turns her into a walking heap of PTSD, unable to achieve the self-awareness she needs to heal or find peace. In the hands of Lucy Prebble, show business is Dante's Inferno. And her lines are still hysterically ironic and funny. She is one of the best writers working right now.

The Last Great Show of 2022

Coming at literally the end of the year, Billie Piper gives the angriest, saddest, funniest, most uncompromising, and most fearless performance of the year in the most uncompromising feminist show of the year. We just worry that she might be torturing herself too much for her art. We know that actors occasionally put themselves through the wringer for a role, but very few put themselves through a proverbial woodchipper as Piper does here. All to bring out the last great show of 2022. It ends with the biggest "F U!" to the toxicity of reality TV and celebrity culture possible. Never mind Scorched Earth and burned bridges, Piper and Prebble burn down the whole toxic universe in an act of unfiltered Female Rage.

I Hate Suzie Too is streaming on HBO Max in the US and Sky in the UK.

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