Fleabag season two is side-splittingly funny, and just as dark

Fleabag just cleaned up big at the Emmy awards and if you haven't watched it yet, remedy this immediately.

There is nothing more exciting than a new season of a phenomenally good TV show.

More exciting than your best friends getting married and more exciting than that trip you’ve spent five months planning — there’s no risk of sitting through a 23-minute speech by someone’s brother or your bags getting lost in Budapest.

The very excellent British dark comedy Fleabag returns for its second season today and every single minute of it is pure gold. Wait, what’s better than gold? Platinum. It’s pure platinum.

Written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the six-episode series is so sharp, you’ll feel like someone has prodded you in the side with a pointy sword — or maybe that’s the stitch you’ll develop from laughing so hard.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge also created the TV adaptation of Killing Eve

Waller-Bridge’s superbly written series centres on a character we only know as Fleabag. She runs an empty cafe by herself after her best friend and business partner died. Her relationship with her abrasive sister Claire (Sian Clifford) is frosty and her godmother (Olivia Colman) is the paragon of passive aggressive.

It’s not a plot-driven series as much as it is situational, as in the bizarre entanglements Fleabag finds herself in, much of it her own making.

The genius in the show, besides the writing, is Fleabag’s asides to us, the audience, some of it one-word commentaries or just an eyebrow raise. It has the same meta energy as Ron Howard’s narrator in Arrested Development, except this explicit breaking of the fourth wall draws us into Fleabag’s world more effectively.

We become complicit in her life, even as she sometimes proves to be an unreliable narrator, holding back some of her darkness and despair until it comes crashing through in an overwhelming wave of emotion.

Oscar winner Olivia Colman has impeccable comedic timing

Waller-Bridge’s screen presence is hypnotic — you want the show to go on forever.

This second season picks up exactly 371 days, 19 hours and 26 minutes after the first, according to a title card that flashes up on screen.

Fleabag is having dinner in an upscale restaurant with her family, a gathering her well-intentioned father accidentally called a “family gang bang”.

For an episode that takes place almost entirely around a table, there is so much verve on screen. The rhythm of the writing and the dynamic between the characters are deliciously watchable. You just want to bathe in the cadence of that dialogue.

The addition of Andrew Scott (Sherlock, Spectre) as a sexy and very sweary priest is an absolute godsend. Scott and Waller-Bridge’s chemistry sizzle, even if Fleabag is mortified (sort of) that she fancies a priest.

He’s as unorthodox as you get for a man of the cloth, cracking open a premix G&T after his service, and joking about being “f**king lonely” and the irony of having a paedophile brother.

Sexy priest

And that’s the key to why Fleabag works so well. It is undeniably dark. Underneath its wickedly alluring sense of humour is a show that is tar-black. Sometimes it hits you like a shovel in the face — and it handles that transition of light and shade perfectly.

Fleabag is an absolute gem of a show, one that consistently delivers and more than earns its place in the top echelon of storytelling.

Fleabag season two is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video now

Share your TV and movies obsessions | @wenleima