Can a fleabag clean up her act?

Fleabag is the rare television show that had me sitting, mouth slightly open, gasping, “I can’t believe they are going there,” all the way through its second season. This feeling had nothing to do with the fact that the first episode of the series features a running joke about anal sex or cringingly awkward family dynamics. Rather, I was left speechless by the show’s willingness to probe questions of religion, commitment, and moral growth—all without losing the playfully filthy sense of humor marked by its name.

The show (now streaming on Amazon Prime) reveals its moral center in the first season. We follow the main character, who is simply listed in the credits as “Fleabag” (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also created and wrote the show), through a series of sexual liaisons, most of them awkward and destructive, very few of them actually pleasurable for her. As she says in the second episode, she is obsessed with sex, “the perfor­mance of it, the drama . . . but not so much the feeling.” It is clear early on that she is floundering, but with a quirky British accent and a stiff upper lip she keeps on going—as though having sex with anyone and everyone were a kind of public service or a private penance.

The most noticeable feature of the show—almost a gimmick—is that Flea­bag talks directly to the viewers. She breaks the action of the scene and ad­dresses the camera, commenting on what is happening. We are her witnesses and her allies, her private journal and her audience. Fleabag would have us believe her life is all a lark, an experiment to see how desirable she is and what she can do with the desire she elicits in others.