Institutionalising the ‘Bad’ Postfeminist: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag from Stage to Television

This chapter investigates the process of normalisation and de-sensationalising manifested in the television adaptation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragicomic one-woman play, Fleabag (2013), arguing that the media transformation of her experimental monologue into an award-winning 2016/2019 TV Series, sponsored by the BBC in the UK and Amazon Prime in the US, exhibits a process of institutionalisation and content moderation inherent in the modern screen entertainment industry. From its premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe, to its critically-acclaimed, commercially popular adaptation on the small screen, Fleabag garnered a number of prestigious awards, including multiple BAFTAs and EMMYs. The factors involved in this precipitous rise to fame have been attributed, amongst others, to audience manipulation, direct address, narrative control, and the ‘precarious girl’ phenomenon. While these elements play important roles in the stage play and its televisual transformation, this chapter identifies a process of commercialism and normalisation, defusing various provocative issues in the play and relocating them in the heteronormative rom-com genre. This chapter finds that the gradual sanitising of controversial content to meet the demands of televisual media and its viewer ratings performs the role of arbiter of public morals, assimilating the despair of people who share the tribulations of the protagonist into the mainstream of situation comedy, thereby diluting the angst of the contemporary, alienated young woman.