For Fans of Fleabag

Most fourth-wall breaks in fiction are a gimmick. In Fleabag they are the architecture. The audience becomes the person she confides in, which means we are complicit in her avoidance of everyone around her. When the show finally forces her to stop talking to us, it is one of the more devastating formal moves in recent television. Waller-Bridge understood that the camera could stand in for intimacy while simultaneously exposing the impossibility of it.

The British tradition of funny-sad has deep roots, from Alan Partridge to The Office to Peep Show, but Fleabag adds something those shows rarely had: genuine tenderness for its protagonist's pain. The comedy is not a mask over the grief; the grief is the source of the comedy. That combination, a writer who finds the laugh without flinching from what causes it, is what separates Fleabag from the pack of sharp-tongued British comedies that aim for a similar target.

The protagonists of Conversations with Friends and Normal People are cousins to Fleabag: young women who intellectualize their feelings to the point of paralysis, who are brilliantly perceptive about everyone except themselves, and who keep making the choice that leads somewhere painful. Rooney does in prose what Waller-Bridge does on screen, which is to make the reader or viewer simultaneously frustrated by and entirely on the side of a person with a genuine talent for self-destruction.

The comparison sounds absurd until you spend twenty minutes with both. Disco Elysium's detective is, like Fleabag's narrator, a person whose self-commentary is funnier and sharper than almost anything else in the medium, whose wit is covering active catastrophe, and whose story is fundamentally about whether someone can accept the truth about themselves. Both works trust their audiences with unreliable narrators who are worth staying with precisely because they keep failing.