In a scene about halfway through the new season of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who writes and stars in every episode, sits inside a confession booth in an old church. The fact that her character, Fleabag, is moved to confess to a priest is a kind of meta-joke for the audience. Because the show itself functions as one long confessional monologue, with the viewer as the protagonist’s personal sounding board as she strides around the streets of London, causing trouble. Waller-Bridge often turns directly to camera in the middle of a scene to add an aside or a nasty piece of commentary; she tells us everything she is about to do and everything she has done, no matter how depraved or desperate. Her eyes plead with the camera not to pan away.

Over the first season, which aired in 2016, we learn that her misdeeds—sleeping around, drinking too much, stealing objects of priceless art from her father’s house—are meant to mask her sadness. She is grieving the loss of the two women closest to her: her mother, who died of breast cancer, and her best friend, Boo, with whom she co-owned a guinea pig–themed café in London, and who killed herself by walking into traffic. If Fleabag were played by a more conventional actress, her spiral might feel cloying or gimmicky. But Waller-Bridge’s delivery is dry and detached, more elegant than enervating. Although she’s a millennial woman carving her way through an alienating urban environment, Fleabag has little in common with other recent characters in this mode, from Girls’ mopey Hannah Horvath to the street-smart pratfallers of Broad City. With her coltish humor, Waller-Bridge is better placed in a lineage of chic and cutting wits—more Noël Coward than Lena Dunham.

The program quickly made her a star and one of the most in-demand (and prolific) screenwriters and showrunners in the business. In 2018, she had a second hit with Killing Eve, a series that she created but did not act in; a blistering cat-and-mouse thriller for BBC America starring two women, a detective and an assassin, who chase each other around Europe. Her next project is the series Run for HBO, starring Merritt Wever and Domhnall Gleeson as friends who abandon their lives and disappear together. Daniel Craig asked her to polish the new James Bond script, to bring a sense of play and a shot of world-weary humor to a staid, hyper-masculine franchise. If you want to inject instant charisma into a hoary property, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the person you call.

The second season of Fleabag reaches beyond debonair spikiness to something more complex and searching. Waller-Bridge takes the big questions her character struggles with—Am I good enough? Can I ever forgive myself? Will anyone ever love me?—and does something so unexpected with them that it is almost sublime. She brings in a priest, and by extension the subject of faith. Fleabag’s wandering takes on a spiritual dimension. She’s not just a messy woman who can’t get her life together. She is a lost lamb, seeking divine redemption.

Although Fleabag might have looked like an overnight success, Waller-Bridge had in fact been working on the project for at least three years before it aired in America. It began as a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013, written when, as a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she was getting by on bit parts in British dramas like Doctors. Her hour-long show was a promising blueprint for her cacophonous, frenetic style: Revived in New York earlier this year, it swings wildly from comedy to tragedy, always testing the viewer. About halfway through, there is a five-minute segment in which she attempts to mime taking a picture of her vagina with her phone, raising her leg at an awkward 90-degree angle. Waller-Bridge revels in these moments, when the audience directly in front of her in the theater can’t look away. It is brilliant physical comedy, which she translates to television with a kind of gangly, Buster Keaton-esque energy.