How Phoebe Waller-Bridge is pop­u­lar­is­ing the female gaze

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve is arguably a world apart from her high­ly acclaimed Ama­zon series, Fleabag, and her hilar­i­ous, sad­ly short-lived sit­com, Crash­ing. And yet her sig­na­ture flair for div­ing into the most vul­ner­a­ble parts of her strongest char­ac­ters has turned this com­e­dy-spy series into some­thing entire­ly her own. The premise is as sim­ple as the sto­ry­line: MI5 agent chas­es Russ­ian spy; Russ­ian spy chas­es MI5 agent. The char­ac­ters who dri­ve it, how­ev­er, are lay­ered, sur­pris­ing and extreme­ly self-aware. And, cru­cial­ly, they are women.

MI5 agent Eve (San­dra Oh) and her assis­tant Ele­na (Kir­by How­ell-Bap­tiste) do not call for (male) back­up when they find them­selves in a dodgy sit­u­a­tion; Vil­lanelle (Jodie Com­er) and Nadia (Olivia Ross) would have been per­fect­ly capa­ble of car­ry­ing out their assign­ment with­out Diego (Edward Akrout) – and this feels com­plete­ly nat­ur­al even in a TV land­scape that does not yet trust its female char­ac­ters to con­vince audi­ences of their emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal capabilities.

Here­in lies the true beau­ty of Waller-Bridge’s work: she has carved out a ver­sa­tile woman’s world in an indus­try that prefers to keep its female char­ac­ters safe­ly parked behind the stove, desk or stroller. The fun­ny thing is that see­ing these rich, dan­ger­ous, flawed and com­plex lives pan out on screen doesn’t feel strange at all.

The appeal of char­ac­ters like Eve and Vil­lanelle does not stem from them being unnec­es­sar­i­ly sex­u­alised, nor do they adhere to the damsel in dis­tress trope so often used to tick­le the ego of male audi­ences. Their fem­i­nin­i­ty is high­light­ed by their intel­lec­tu­al mer­its, their open­ly ambi­tious pur­suits and fright­en­ing abil­i­ty to com­part­men­talise. As with Fleabag, their defin­ing traits, though not always strict­ly like­able – and, iron­i­cal­ly, very yang – do not need to be com­pen­sat­ed with lip­stick and sul­try looks.

Com­er and Oh exude con­fi­dence in their scenes; they move with ease, con­scious only of their char­ac­ters because they are not weighed down by trite acces­sories often added to the stan­dard female sto­ry­line. Killing Eve, Crash­ing and Fleabag are told from a place that does not need acces­soris­ing – these shows are com­fort­able in recog­nis­ing the dual­i­ty of the female (read: human) experience.

“I’m not good at grief,” Ele­na states in an effort to ease the painful awk­ward­ness Bill’s death has left in its wake in Killing Eve’s most recent episode, ​‘Sor­ry Baby’. But grief is a top­ic Waller-Bridge is so, so skilled at explor­ing. It is a reoc­cur­ring theme in her shows, each of which tack­les it from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent stand­point, one that adds to the over­all intri­ca­cies of her characters.

In Fleabag, the tit­u­lar character’s deeply root­ed grief, and its accom­pa­ny­ing guilt, informs her sex­u­al mis­ad­ven­tures; Crashing’s Sam (Jonathan Bai­ley) finds com­fort from an unlike­ly source, name­ly Fred (Amit Sha), who helps him recog­nise the sever­i­ty of his mourn­ing and sex­u­al flu­id­i­ty; in Killing Eve, the sense of loss is a lot more abstract but every bit as appar­ent. Upon los­ing her friend and part­ner, Bill (David Haig), Eve is dis­traught with­out ever real­ly allow­ing her­self the time to be dis­traught. What real­ly defines this under­ly­ing sense of loss in Killing Eve, how­ev­er, is the char­ac­ters’ loss of con­trol over their lives, work envi­ron­ment and relationships.

Waller-Bridge’s writ­ing is pop­u­lar­is­ing the female gaze for main­stream audi­ences by chal­leng­ing tra­di­tion­al for­mats – in the case of Killing Eve, the typ­i­cal­ly mas­cu­line spy genre – and inject­ing seri­ous scenes with dark humour and the sur­pris­ing grace­less­ness with which her char­ac­ters han­dle their emo­tion­al bag­gage. The musi­cal direc­tion on her shows ele­vates this refresh­ing approach to sto­ry­telling, often veer­ing from adren­a­line-fuelled, clas­sic dra­mat­ic scores and instead opt­ing to empha­sise the char­ac­ters’ men­tal states through roman­tic bal­lads (to real­ly dri­ve home the ​“espi­onage love” between Vil­lanelle and Eve) or chaot­i­cal­ly melan­cholic tracks à la Awolnation’s ​‘Sail’ (to demon­strate the inner tur­moil Fleabag expe­ri­ences when her peri­od announces itself by ways of roy­al headfucks).

Waller-Bridge’s work is nor­mal­is­ing fem­i­nist sto­ry­telling in a way that doesn’t alien­ate male view­ers but, rather, intro­duces new arche­types which rep­re­sent mod­ern con­cepts and prac­tis­es such as the sup­port­ive, cook­ing hus­band and the supe­ri­or sud­den­ly turned infe­ri­or on Killing Eve. Her male char­ac­ters are not demeaned and are every bit as relat­able as those fea­tured on testos­terone-fuelled shows. The only dif­fer­ence is that they are tak­ing the back seat – the way female char­ac­ters have for decades. The mes­sage of Phoebe’s shows is loud and clear: time’s up.