"I have a horrible feeling that I'm a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist," said Phoebe Waller-Bridge's prickly anti-heroine in season 1 of Fleabag.

"Well," replied her father, pausing, "you get all that from your mother."

Based on her solo stage show of 2013, 33-year-old Waller-Bridge's very dark, very British, and very funny sitcom, named after its protagonist, began as a grand study of passive aggression, family toxicity and female self-destruction.

And yet, by the end of season 2 (streaming now on Amazon Prime) Fleabag raised the prospect of something a little softer, a little more heartbreaking and a little more relatable: messy contentment and self-forgiveness, without a neat redemption arc.

The details of Fleabag's story of self-acceptance are lived-in, the sex is a drug she can't turn away from, and the mood of awkwardness relentlessly turns to pathos.

Fleabag has been particularly praised for the way it experiments with breaking the fourth wall. ( Supplied: BBC Three )

Season 1 saw Fleabag flailing to deal with the deaths of her best friend and her mother, while half-heartedly running an empty, overpriced cafe in London.

In scenes of excruciating cringe, Fleabag negotiated her ever-changing family life with her stepmonster-to-be, Godmother, played with manipulative glee by Olivia Colman. And she tried to maintain a friendship with her sister, Claire (Sian Clifford), an uptight corporate type who can't quite face the hetero misery of her unravelling marriage to alcoholic disaster-man Martin (Brett Gelman).

These are all people who love one another, but dislike one another.

To this mix of psychologically damaged individuals, season 2 adds a new love interest for Fleabag: The Priest (Andrew Scott), the kind of warm, frank, engaging church leader who is liable to crack open a premix G&T after a sermon, and who is enlisted to marry Fleabag's Dad and Godmother. The new season's plot careens towards their wedding as the inevitable scene of a new family disaster.

Andrew Scott, who plays The Priest, is well-known for his roles in the recent BBC remake Sherlock and 2014 film Pride. ( Supplied: BBC Three )

Part of the new season's plotting genius is that Fleabag is a person who can't help but create more problems for herself. The Priest is celibate — sworn to God. By fixating on a romantic interest who is categorically unavailable to her, Fleabag seems to be unable to set her sights on things that could actually make her happy.

And yet, The Priest is a kind and intelligent man, who harbours a genuine, impossible-to-ignore connection with the show's protagonist. She uses sex to evade emotional intimacy; he is desexualised by his profession and faith. The conflict of their desire and sexual tension exhilarates every advancement of season 2's narrative.

As in season 1, the series hinges on theatrical asides made by Fleabag to the camera — to us. In these intimate moments of admission, she give us access to her darkest, most interior thoughts, and allows the show to go beyond the vicious laughs of a comedy of embarrassment.

With her crimson lipstick and sarcastically curling brows, Fleabag appears at the apex of decades of bad-woman comedies. Her origins as a comedic figure trace back to Seinfeld, the 1990s' seminal sitcom of cynicism, in which Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) coasted through life in New York City on a string of dead-end dates and dull jobs with her equally cynical friends Jerry, George and Kramer.

Fleabag's sister Claire, played by Sian Clifford, is the only character in her immediate family to be given a proper name. ( Supplied: BBC Three )

Now, we have Issa Rae's sex comedy Insecure, Sharon Horgan's knife-edged examination of marriage in Catastrophe, and the glorious train wreck of Sally4Ever by Julia Davis.

Fleabag is also a woman peering over today's neoliberal cliff of despair. Without directly addressing the political chaos of job insecurity, millennial malaise and economic anxiety, the show is one of many TV comedies rising out of that culture.

Like Atlanta, Russian Doll and Search Party, Fleabag follows bridge-burning quasi-adults who can't quite manage to come of age, instead wandering listlessly about their own lives and exercising questionable judgment.

At their troubled hearts, these TV comedies are preoccupied with the idea of goodness. How to be good? Is self-improvement even possible? Or should smart, complex, difficult people merely be happy to be unhappy — content to stew in their own dysfunction?

The originality of Fleabag is that it doesn't merely dwell in the cynicism of the present cultural moment. Season 2 sees Waller-Bridge (who also masterminded Killing Eve, another major British TV story exploring the shadowy side of femininity) break her own boundaries in emotionally and creatively rich ways.

Her performance in Fleabag won Waller-Bridge Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme at the 2017 BAFTAs. ( Supplied: BBC Three )

Several mystical moments between the sexy Priest and Fleabag even go so far as to invest in an almost spiritual idea of human connection. For an atheist, Fleabag's searching, questing quality puts her on an unconventional road to precarious redemption.

Season 2 also thickens the uneasy feminist drama established in the first season. Cinema icon Kristin Scott Thomas' appearance — as a 58-year-old accepting an infantilising, ghettoising "Women in Business" award at Claire's work — sees another potent moment of connection, this time, between two formidable women across generations.

Over a daytime martini with Fleabag, Scott Thomas's character delivers an electrifying monologue on the ugly bruisings of life as a woman: "Women are born with pain built in ... period pain, sore boobs, childbirth. [Men] have to seek it out ... they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren't any wars, they can play rugby." It stands one of the year's most brilliant shards of TV writing.

The show's exploration of grief and the tangling complexity of grown-up sibling relationships in the vein of Transparent and Six Feet Under ("The only person I'd run through an airport for is you," confesses Claire, matter-of-fact-ly, to Fleabag), in scenes delivered in the drollest of expressions and dialogue, defines Fleabag as unique in the current slew of shows about difficult, toxic women.

Though we never do find out Fleabag's true name, the show gets realer as season 2 progresses, and there is nothing realer than The Priest's speech at Dad and Godmother's terrible wedding.

"Love is awful," he laments, in a scene that will surely be discussed for years to come. "It's awful. It's painful. It's frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do... Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope."

In that moment, a story of deep perversity becomes one of brutal, beautiful optimism.

Loading...