I love messy women, especially if they’re on my television screen. I am a messy woman; emotions spilling out just slightly here or there as if the tension on the surface of a glass has recently been disrupted. Until the past decade or so, it was rare to see a woman be messy onscreen in a television series or movie. If she was, she was certainly not redeemable or likable and, as we all know, being likable is the most important thing to be if you’re a woman in media. To be clear, I don’t want all female characters to be likable. I want to have enough female representation on screen that we can have both irredeemable villainous characters, as well as likable imperfect characters. Thankfully, the industry might be moving in that direction.
Shows like The Flight Attendant and I May Destroy You aren’t necessarily asking the audience whether or not their female protagonists are likable or not, good or bad, victim or perpetrator. If they’re asking the audience anything, it’s to have empathy for these complicated, multi-dimensional women as they go through crises. It’s shocking what can happen when women are behind the camera in roles like creator, producer, writer, director, etc. Co-created by actress and former pop singer Billie Piper and Succession co-executive producer, writer and playwright, Lucy Prebble, I Hate Suzie shines a light on how women actually process grief, instead of how society thinks they should.
Piper plays Suzie Pickles, a character loosely drawn from Piper’s own life, including a brief singing career in her youth and a breakout acting role as the first Doctor Who companion in the 2006 reboot. Suzie was discovered on a Eurovision-type show as a teenager and acted in a massive science fiction show when she was younger. Currently, Suzie is acting in a Nazi zombie television series, just landed the role of an aging princess in a Disney film, and is about to do a Cruella de Vil-style photoshoot in her home in the English countryside that she shares with her husband and child. These types of darkly comedic scenarios are the backdrop to the rest of the series. Amidst all this, Suzie becomes the victim of a photo leak and her private photos are spread all across the internet.
Each episode of I Hate Suzie is named after a stage of grief. The first episode is aptly titled “Shock.” Piper’s face, often in close-up throughout the series, is incredibly evocative. After Suzie learns about the photo leak, she doesn’t mention what happened to her husband, Cob (Daniel Ings), and tries to hide that anything is happening from him. Suzie walks around the house, unplugs the router, and hides any devices that connect to the internet. It soon becomes very obvious that Suzie is freaking out. Her jittery movements and panic-induced diarrhea are only the beginning. It’s hard to ascertain what she’s thinking; that she can ignore it and make it all go away? Nothing she could do at this moment is “right” by societal standards. People do weird nonsensical things when they’re in shock, and Suzie is just trying to keep her emotions in check because that’s what women are told to do. If women let their emotions out, it’s too much, too intense, too performative, too, too, too.
The audience sees Suzie contain her emotions episode after episode; through denial, fear, shame, bargaining, guilt, and eventually anger. In episode seven, Suzie finally lets some of that rage out. She’s been keeping a tight rein on this horse throughout the series: when she realizes that she’s lost the Disney job due to cocaine being in the leaked pictures, when Cob gaslights and bulldozes her again and again, even when she finds out her dad wants to sell stories about her to tabloids. When the pictures leaked, they revealed that Suzie is having an affair with Carter (Nathaniel Martello-White), the Black showrunner on the Nazi zombie production. There appears to be some genuine affection between Suzie and Carter. At one point, Carter swears his undying love for Suzie, says that he told his wife about their affair, and he’s leaving his wife for Suzie. Suzie tells him that she can’t leave her family and he insists she’s ruining his life. Suzie later finds out that Carter lied. After Suzie has been sexualized, vilified, and scorned by the press, pressured to quit the Nazi zombie television show by her husband to prove her loyalty to him, and lost the Disney offer, Carter has lost nothing. He never told his wife and they’re still together. He’s even still the showrunner on the absurdly offensive Nazi zombie show. When Suzie realizes Carter lied, she looks shocked. It’s finally hitting her; her life has crumbled and nothing has happened to him even though they were both present for the pictures. Anger begins to bubble up and, later in the episode, she’ll finally explode.
Some of the only times we see Suzie be forthright is with her friend and agent, Naomi (Leila Farzad). Naomi is not afraid to speak her mind and constantly reminds Suzie that being sexual isn’t shameful; everybody has a dick in their hands at one point or another. Naomi’s also a bit messy in her own right. She’s spent most of her adult life focused on Suzie so much so that she doesn’t even know herself as well as she knows Suzie. Women are taught to be altruistic by nature; to focus on others, not themselves. Both Suzie and Naomi express this altruism in different ways; Suzie is constantly keeping her true opinions to herself lest they hurt others and Naomi consistently puts aside her own wants for her clients’ wants.
One of the best episodes of the season, “Shame,” features a decadent ride through Suzie’s brain as she tries to masturbate to different fantasies. At the same time, Naomi witnesses a man masturbating next to her on the train. Naomi spends much of her time touting intersectional feminist ideologies, so when she doesn’t say anything to the man or even take the time to report him, it feels oppositional to her very ethos. Naomi talks about dismantling the patriarchal structure that is dictating the repercussions of the photo leak, but she can’t take the time to report the man on the train, get justice for herself, and ensure it won’t happen to other women. It’s not hard to understand why she doesn’t report the train masturbator. She has meetings with Disney executives, and she doesn’t have time to try and right every wrong that’s been perpetrated against her. It would be exhausting.
When Suzie tries to masturbate, it’s the audience’s biggest peek into her mind yet. Her fantasies are all about her partner’s pleasure and what he thinks is sexy, instead of what she thinks is sexy. Society is inundated with what men think is sexy, or what men think women think is sexy. This sequence gives the audience the opportunity to empathize with why Suzie cheated on her husband. It’s easy to vilify a cheater onscreen, but when the audience can see the laughter and joy in Suzie’s sexual experiences with Carter versus Cob, it becomes a bit hard to do so.
After Suzie left the farcical Nazi zombie show and lost the Disney gig, she auditioned for a play, “The Party of Monica Lewinsky.” At a workshop presided over by an absurdly patronizing “genius” of a director, she’s told, “you can’t play not wanting something.” Women can’t have a driving emotion be a negative or a lack of something. Women have to want something to push them onward in life. It’s an infuriating statement and Suzie finally, thankfully, says, “fuck you.” She leaves the workshop, steps in some dog poop, throws her shoe out the window when the cab driver complains about the smell, and has to deal with some very slow customer service. She tries to keep it together, but she unleashes her rage on a stranger in a car who stopped to let Suzie walk in front of him. She waves him on because she doesn’t want to cross the street at that moment so he starts honking and continues encouraging her to cross. Suzie starts yelling at him, kicks his car, and gives him the middle finger.
It’s invigorating. Suzie has been dealt bad card after bad card. Everyone around her seems to have forgotten that she was the victim of a crime. Her private photos were put on the internet. She also cheated on her husband. She’s not listening to her husband and her child, Frank, an eight-year-old deaf boy, when they say Frank wants to attend a school for deaf children and be a member of the Deaf community. She can’t even sit and listen to Naomi talk about losing clients or moving to Iran without turning the conversation back around to herself. She’s so far from perfect and she doesn’t embody all that is “good” in a mother, wife, or female friend. Even with all that, she still deserves to be angry.
In the final episode, the audience sees Suzie finally speak her mind thanks to a voiceover. Sometimes she thinks she might hate herself for doing it. Other people certainly hate her for doing it. When she finally tells Cob that she is breaking up with him, he belittles her and insists she won’t find anybody else to love her broken selfish awful self. It’s so easy to cheer Suzie on at this moment. Yet she also says and does things that are difficult to watch. In the penultimate episode, she spanks Frank. He stepped on their pet rabbit and killed it, which is rather shocking, but any type of physical punishment, including spanking, is typically considered heinous in the 21st century. In another scene from the finale, she dismisses Naomi’s desire to travel to Iran and connect with her roots as ridiculous. She doesn’t acknowledge Naomi’s ethnicity and different lived experience than hers and it’s incredibly painful to watch her do so.
Everybody around Suzie, especially the men, believes their thoughts and opinions have value so they share them with the world. Why shouldn’t she? It’s easy to disagree with her in a few key moments like the ones with Frank and Naomi. Her pain and trauma are still valid and worthy of recognition. As soon as Suzie starts telling others what she actually thinks, versus what she thinks they want to hear, then maybe she can finally confront who she really is; the good and the bad. It’s very easy to let others tell you who you are; it’s a lot harder to decide for yourself.
It’s the dawn of a new decade and I’m looking back on why I Hate Suzie was one of my favorite shows of the 2010s. Not only did it have a messy female protagonist, but her best friend was complicated and multi-dimensional as well. Women in media now get to be unreliable narrators, unlikeable, or even villainous. They get to be superheroes and express sexual desires in unconventional ways. To put it succinctly, progress has been made over the past decade for on-screen female characters. Has it been enough? Certainly not. We only have to look at how black female creators like Micaela Coel of I May Destroy You were snubbed at the controversial Golden Globes this year to see a prime example of why we’re nowhere near the finish line, particularly for women who aren’t white, straight, able-bodied, or cisgender. But I Hate Suzie tackled female desire in a way I had never seen, as well as female friendship and its pitfalls and how easy it is to gaslight victims. Piper’s acting chops were on riveting display and Prebble’s writing is demonstrably scathing and satirical. I Hate Suzie has recently been renewed for a second season, and I’m excited to see what Piper and Prebble do as the show progresses.
