Billie Piper makes I Hate Suzie funny, painful and difficult to turn away from. We recommend its prickly comedy, though the more fanciful passages sometimes insist on feelings that the performance has already made clear.
I Hate Suzie is a comedy-drama about a celebrity in crisis, and it understands how tiring it can be to spend time with someone who needs to be seen. Creators Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper keep us close to Suzie Pickles even when her decisions make that company uncomfortable. We recommend it for the acting and the sharpness of its comedy, with reservations about some of its more elaborate flourishes. There is plenty here to laugh at, but little opportunity to relax.
Billie Piper is the reason that closeness works. Her performance makes Suzie’s public personality and private distress feel inseparable: being watched seems to affect even how she falls apart. We laughed, then felt uncomfortable about laughing, because her exposed distress makes the destructive behaviour painful to sit through. She gives us enough to recognise the effort of holding herself together, while allowing Suzie to remain difficult, selfish and capable of exhausting our patience.
Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper’s writing is strongest when it lets Suzie be difficult without pausing to tidy up our response. A lead character does not need to behave well, but we do need a reason to keep spending time with her. Here, her shifting celebrity persona gives the comedy something specific to work on: the exhausting business of remaining recognisable while privately struggling. The jokes keep changing how we see her, so even a funny passage can leave us feeling uneasy.
The changes of style are often effective because they make the series restless in the same way as its central performance. Comedy, distress and fantasy sit close together, and the shifts prevent Suzie’s crisis settling into one dependable tone. That can be abrasive, but a smoother programme would lose some of the discomfort that makes this one worth watching. At its most assured, the series allows the humour to become painful without stopping to announce that we should now take it seriously.
The fanciful passages are less reliable. Some press an image or an idea beyond the point where it helps, making us notice how insistently the programme is explaining a feeling. The symbolism can be obvious, and the whimsy occasionally interrupts the more exact work being done by Billie Piper. When the performance is already so exposed, an extra flourish can leave us impatient to get back to the person.
As a comedy-drama built around a difficult central character, it avoids the tiresome business of continually asking us to forgive her. Suzie’s destructive choices are allowed to trouble us, and the humour does not depend on finding them secretly admirable. The series earns sympathy through the openness of the acting, although its determination to stay so close to her can become wearing. That narrow concentration works best when the writing gives her behaviour enough space to be funny without explaining it afterwards.
The first series runs to eight episodes, a substantial stretch of time to spend inside this kind of turmoil. We would leave some breathing space between them rather than make an endurance test of it. Its shifts in style demand attention, particularly when the fantasy starts to crowd the performance. Choose it for an evening when an uncomfortable laugh sounds welcome, and allow a little patience for the flourishes.
