Fleabag is brilliant and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is some kind of remarkable genius and savant. Watch her in Crashing first. That show really needs a season 2 but sadly, that looks unlikely. Season 1 of Fleabag is heartbreaking and hilarious and humbling. Season 2 is some of the best TV ever made and I venture to say that the last episode of S2 could be the best 26 minutes of television ever filmed, it's that good. Thanks to Vox and Emily St. James for this review :: For most of my life, I’ve had the vague suspicion that I am a fictional character. Ever since I was a kid, like a really, really little kid, I’ve had a sense of the edges of my reality, of the people in the studio audience who might be watching me.

Not actually, right? Like ... I don’t genuinely believe that if I sailed far enough out into the ocean I might bump into a wall painted to look like the sky, like Truman in The Truman Show. I know that no one is watching me on a screen, that I’m not a character in a novel or anything like that. (When Elon Musk briefly tried to convince everyone that we live in a simulation, I had a moment of, “Hmm ... maybe!”) The “fictional character” feeling hasn’t materially impacted my life in any way — though I’m aware that with a few twists in my mind here and there, it could have been debilitating.

But never mind that I know I’m a real person and not a construct. I still catch myself bumping up against little moments of serendipity that feel like they were written, more than events that happened. Or I’ll hear someone say something particularly concerning and mug for an unseen camera like Jim Halpert on The Office.

I don’t like to talk about this because saying, “I think I’m a fictional character,” is a pretty good way to make people around you feel very concerned about your well-being. But this little suspicion sneaking around the edges of my consciousness has always been a minor disassociation, a way of distracting myself from myself and inventing reasons that the pain and struggle associated with anybody’s life are part of some larger story that somebody somewhere is telling about me, to the cheers of an adoring audience.

Rating: 5 out of 5

The more I’ve talked to friends about it, or noticed the ways that they, too, mug for unseen cameras, the more I’ve realized that maybe not everybody thinks about reality in quite the way I often have, but almost all of us are aware of it somehow. Modern life feels so weird and meaningless and cruel at times — and modern technology makes it so easy to apply a performative filter to it, in the form of one screen or another — that starting to imagine some other reality just behind that fourth wall over there is tempting, at least a little bit. It’s a detachment. A defense mechanism.

So when BBC and Amazon’s Fleabag — a show about a woman named Fleabag, who is, like me, in her 30s, and who keeps breaking the fourth wall to talk to the audience, sometimes while she’s in the middle of a conversation with somebody on her plane of reality — released a second season that directly addressed this same tendency within Fleabag herself, I almost couldn’t look right at it. It was too bright.

And it’s one of the best seasons of TV I’ve seen in ages.