Phoebe Waller-Bridge knows how to write rascals. The women in her shows trespass, bound around indecorous and vulgar, and steal things (priceless objects, boyfriends) simply for the thrill of it. In her much-lauded Amazon series Fleabag, which debuted in 2016 (a second season is currently in the works), the now 32-year-old Waller-Bridge wrote and starred in every episode as a willful, petulant Londoner called Fleabag, who is dead-set on napalming her own life after the suicide of her best friend and business partner, Boo. Fleabag doesn’t initially present as a person who lopes around with a guilty conscience; she stares directly into the camera and makes jokes about masturbation and flatulence with a curled lip. And yet, there is a lot more going on. Fleabag has lured her audience into a false confidence; we feel sorry for her suffering, but it turns out that she may have been the lead architect of her own unhappiness.

Fleabag was a self-contained story about one woman’s emotional waterloo and her need to confront her failings, but in many ways, it was a showcase for exactly what Waller-Bridge could do with a bigger paintbox. Fleabag was a dubious narrator, a fabulist with delusions of grandeur and a smart-ass retort for everyone. She was not to be trusted, least of all with her own story. The ending of Fleabag turned us all into detectives; once I learned that the character was not prone to truth-telling, I went back and started the series all over again. That show, as specific as it was, was an ideal proof-of-concept for Waller-Bridge’s next project. It demonstrated that she could write women whose motives were slippery, who were experts at evasion. If she could write so convincingly about a woman hiding from adulthood, she could certainly write about secret agents.

If she could write so convincingly about a woman hiding from adulthood, she could certainly write about secret agents.

Killing Eve, a new eight-episode spy thriller that begins airing on BBC America on Sunday night, tells the story of two women who chase each other across Europe, one a stealth assassin, and the other an MI5 agent who tracks her scent around the globe. Waller-Bridge does not act in the show but oversees it; she adapted the pilot from the “Villanelle” novels by Luke Jennings (a series of mysteries that first became popular as self-published e-books), and her voice is apparent from the very beginning of the pilot.

The first scene takes place in a Viennese cafe, as we see our killer, a doe-eyed brunette (in a wig) whose code name is Villanelle (Jodie Comer), blithely spooning ice cream out of a silver dish. She flashes a toothy smile across the restaurant at a little girl, who is also digging into her sorbet. At first, we think that Villanelle might be harmless, just a stylish woman who enjoys a solo dessert and a warm exchange with a child. And then, as she struts out of the cafe, Villanelle smacks the girl’s ice cream dish off the table. She smirks, pleased with the chaos she has caused. We know right away that she is a sociopath; that she revels in mayhem. Quickly, we learn that she is a psychopath, too. The reason she was in Vienna was to slice a Russian politician’s femoral artery, right in front of his girlfriend. It is safe to assume that she grinned after this act, too; bloody murder, toppled ice cream, for her it’s all the same old mischief.

Back in London, as agents at MI5 are looking into the assassination, we meet Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), an American woman who works in a deskbound role at the bureau but has the bloodhound instincts of a field agent. The moment she hears about Villanelle’s hit, she sniffs out the fact that the killer must be a woman; she notes that the politician who was killed was “a misogynist and a sex trafficker, he may not have considered a passing woman a threat; she must have been able to get close.” Right away, one senses that Eve and Villanelle are linked; not because the are both soulless (that distinction belongs to the killer alone) but because they are both bored.