I Hate Suzie: I Hate Suzie (full season - 8 episodes)
December 27, 2020 12:38 PM - Season 1 (Full Season) - Subscribe
After her phone is hacked and sex pictures are leaked to the Internet, Suzie Pickles's life tips sideways. The ensuing scandal brings great tumult in her acting career, her marriage, her family, and her relationship with her agent and best friend--and forces her to confront things in her life that weren't so stable beforehand as well.
Created by Billie Piper (who stars as Suzie) and Lucy Prebbles, who also worked together on Secret Diary of a Call Girl. With Leila Farzad as her friend/agent Noemi and Daniel Ings as her husband Cob.
The titles of the eight episodes follow the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, loosely; Shock, Denial, Fear, Shame, Bargaining, Guilt, Anger, and Acceptance. It feels like a self-contained miniseries, though apparently the creators are open to another season if this one is received well.
Anna Russell review in The New Yorker: The Gut-Punch Humor of I Hate Suzie
Created by Billie Piper (who stars as Suzie) and Lucy Prebbles, who also worked together on Secret Diary of a Call Girl. With Leila Farzad as her friend/agent Noemi and Daniel Ings as her husband Cob.
The titles of the eight episodes follow the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, loosely; Shock, Denial, Fear, Shame, Bargaining, Guilt, Anger, and Acceptance. It feels like a self-contained miniseries, though apparently the creators are open to another season if this one is received well.
Anna Russell review in The New Yorker: The Gut-Punch Humor of I Hate Suzie
My bad on Lucy Prebble! Thanks for correcting. I had the similar sounding Suzie Pickles on the brain, I guess.
I am mostly watching gentler stuff these days and expected to nope out of this but I couldn’t stop watching it—I found it a great grim satire, & darkly hilarious. Billie Piper gives a generous and riveting performance: it's an unflattering portrait of a selfish and privileged star on a self-destructive tear. Shitty things happen to her and she makes consistently shitty choices too. The other leads—Noemi & her husband Cob--are also fully realized characters, navigating their own needs and frustration while trapped on Suzie's bumpy ride.
The direction and production design are playful and straight-up amazing all the way through, and each episode has a really different feel and set of cinematic references. (Six of the eight episodes were directed by Georgi Banks-Davies, & the other two were by Anthony Neilson.) The first episode is woozy and utterly claustrophobic; Fear is filmed like a taut psychological thriller, with nods to Hitchcock and Gaslight, which is perfect for revealing how threatening and controlling Cob is as well; the extended wanking-dreamworld of Shame is trippy and hilarious; the wedding sequence in Guilt (my favorite) has some Cassavetes-style realism; at the end of the very arty Acceptance, Suzie becomes a kind of Blanche DuBois--dressed in a jacket of della Robbia blue and dependent on the kindness of strangers. All this visual cleverness made the show feel more ambitious to me than cringe comedy in a mockumentary style, though there’s some overlap in ritualized humiliation.
I also love the snippets we see of her acting work: the suuuuper 90s-looking QUO VADIS costumes and posters are very Seven of Nine in Voyager, and also call back to her appearance as Rose Tyler in Dr. Who. And the "Nazi zombie" show and the Monica Lewinsky musical are funny one-offs that seem absurdly plausible too.
posted by miles per flower at 5:04 PM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
I am mostly watching gentler stuff these days and expected to nope out of this but I couldn’t stop watching it—I found it a great grim satire, & darkly hilarious. Billie Piper gives a generous and riveting performance: it's an unflattering portrait of a selfish and privileged star on a self-destructive tear. Shitty things happen to her and she makes consistently shitty choices too. The other leads—Noemi & her husband Cob--are also fully realized characters, navigating their own needs and frustration while trapped on Suzie's bumpy ride.
The direction and production design are playful and straight-up amazing all the way through, and each episode has a really different feel and set of cinematic references. (Six of the eight episodes were directed by Georgi Banks-Davies, & the other two were by Anthony Neilson.) The first episode is woozy and utterly claustrophobic; Fear is filmed like a taut psychological thriller, with nods to Hitchcock and Gaslight, which is perfect for revealing how threatening and controlling Cob is as well; the extended wanking-dreamworld of Shame is trippy and hilarious; the wedding sequence in Guilt (my favorite) has some Cassavetes-style realism; at the end of the very arty Acceptance, Suzie becomes a kind of Blanche DuBois--dressed in a jacket of della Robbia blue and dependent on the kindness of strangers. All this visual cleverness made the show feel more ambitious to me than cringe comedy in a mockumentary style, though there’s some overlap in ritualized humiliation.
I also love the snippets we see of her acting work: the suuuuper 90s-looking QUO VADIS costumes and posters are very Seven of Nine in Voyager, and also call back to her appearance as Rose Tyler in Dr. Who. And the "Nazi zombie" show and the Monica Lewinsky musical are funny one-offs that seem absurdly plausible too.
posted by miles per flower at 5:04 PM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
I watched the first three or four episodes and couldn't bear to watch any more. It was far too frenetic and chaotic for me.
posted by essexjan at 12:21 PM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by essexjan at 12:21 PM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]
This aired a few months a go here in the UK, and has scored a mention in almost everyone's "Best of 2020" lists. Superb writing from Prebble and a fearless performance of this utterly unhinged character by Piper.
I gather the two women are close friends in real life, so I hope we see them working together on another project soon. They're both formidable talents in their own right, but when they team up there's something there that's more than the sum of its parts.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:42 AM on December 29, 2020
I gather the two women are close friends in real life, so I hope we see them working together on another project soon. They're both formidable talents in their own right, but when they team up there's something there that's more than the sum of its parts.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:42 AM on December 29, 2020
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BTW, the writer is Lucy Prebble (no “s”). She’s also co-exec producer and writer for Succession.
posted by adrianhon at 3:42 PM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]