I Hate Susie Too, Sky Atlantic Review: Billie Piper’s Best Job

It’s deep inside I hate Susie too someone notes: “When there is so much chaos around a person, in the end you wonder if it’s because he really likes it.” But that has always been the central question in this series: how responsible is a person for his actions? And how are they victims of circumstance?

Created by Billie Piper and authored by Lucy Prebble (successor, Very expensive poison) the first episode was arguably one of the most terrifying series of 2020 following the disastrous explosion of Susie Pickles (Piper), a former child singer, sci-fi franchise star and middle-class celebrity.

We pick up Susie, who is embroiled in a bitter custody battle with her future ex-husband Cobb (Daniel Ings), who helpfully sold her a sad revelation. daily mail. Susie’s relationship with Naomi (Layla Farzad), her best friend and former agent, who lives in her pregnant sister’s tiny apartment and pays outrageous legal fees, is almost at a freezing point.

Meanwhile, her new management team is resurrecting scraps of her career blown to shreds by a leak of intimate photos from a previous series that revealed an extramarital affair. Mad dancemaniac strict– as a television show-competition on the eve of Christmas. The three-episode series is billed as an “anti-Christmas special” and the gaudy celebrity portrayal certainly lends itself well to a gaudy holiday makeover.

In a clean re-imagining of series one’s harrowing prelude, in which Susie’s life came crashing down during a haute couture photoshoot, in season two she is once again physically caught up in a suffocating whirlwind of fame. Pushed, pulled and primed backstage Mad danceThe outfits and makeup just got better – her life was already a circus, but now Susie literally wears clown makeup and dances to confirm.

In case you forgot how exhausting it is to watch this show, there is no relaxation. The series is even more claustrophobic than the first, as both Susie’s success in the dance show and her relationship with her son are under tremendous pressure from the Christmas deadline. .

Piper’s acting is playfully grotesque, her forced smile fills the screen, and suffocating camerawork follows her every move. Some sounds, like the creaking of her divorce lawyer’s office door, echo over everything else as the show’s direction takes us into her waking nightmare.

I hate Susie too creatively daring, playing with form and convention, using musical numbers and fantastic sequences to disrupt and surprise. But while the idea of ​​a dance show is the perfect canvas to multiply Susie’s predicament – in particular, the costumes remain fantastical and a bit ludicrous and the choreography delightfully bizarre – Prebble always finds a place for humanity amidst the chaos. In the first episode, Susie has an abortion at home with direct and detailed authenticity, while later, the depiction of Naomi starting IVF treatment (hormonal injections in her belly in the parking lot) is just as disgusting.

If the first series was close to an awkward line, insistently asking if we love or hate this difficult, complex character, the second series made him even harder to summon. Susie’s despair and dysfunction have escalated along with her self-destructive tendencies, but the series offers moments of sickening selfishness along with extraordinary empathy, especially in the finale’s triumphant panic attack.

It’s unbearable to watch, then laugh out loud funny, I hate Susie too likely to be just as controversial as the first series, but it’s a unique and innovative take on both the absurdity of celebrity and the impossibility of femininity that Prebble and Piper convey with confidence.