Lately, when I’m having a particularly bad day, I think about a scene from “I Hate Suzie,” an ingenious new show from Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper. At the end of the first episode, Piper, playing an actress named Suzie Pickles, careens down the high street of a bucolic English village. She has just finished a chaotic photo shoot at her home, nearby, and is wearing a black-and-white fur coat splashed with fake blood. (The shoot is promotional; there’s a Cruella De Vil connection.) Suzie’s lipstick is smeared, and her mascara has formed rings around her eyes, which dart from side to side, furtively. “I just need a charger. I just need a charger,” she says to herself. “Have you got a charger, mate?” she asks a passerby, who quickly looks away. “I hate this, I hate this . . . I hate this fucking place.” She passes a church (“I hate the church”), and a pub (“I hate the pub”). Suddenly, she breaks into song; her voice is startlingly light and sweet. “I hate seeing the stars at night,” she sings. “I miss the smog and the rising crime!” She does a dainty little twirl. It’s exactly what having a crackup feels like.
“I Hate Suzie” follows the unravelling of its main character’s life in eight sharply drawn episodes, each named, more or less, after a stage of grief: “Shock,” “Denial,” “Fear,” “Shame,” “Bargaining,” “Guilt,” “Anger,” and “Acceptance.” The series premièred in the U.K. in August to jubilant reviews (“Piper is nude, lewd, and joyously off the rails,” the Guardian wrote), and arrived on HBO Max on November 19th. Suzie’s breakdown is triggered when her phone is hacked and compromising photos are leaked to the press. Nudity might not be so bad, but the pictures also reveal an affair. Her husband, a university lecturer and expert mansplainer, played with bitter condescension by Daniel Ings, immediately changes the locks.
In Britain, Piper is a household name, having achieved fame early, at fifteen, as a pop star, when her 1998 single “Because We Want To” débuted at No. 1. (Sample lyric: “Why you gotta play that song so loud? / Because we want to! Because we want to!”) In the early aughts, Piper developed a following on television as Rose, the plucky sidekick on “Doctor Who,” and then as a high-end sex worker in “Secret Diary of a Call Girl.” Prebble, who wrote “I Hate Suzie,” is also a writer and co-executive producer on “Succession.” When she was in her twenties, she wrote the script for “Secret Diary.” “The best thing about that show was meeting Billie,” she told me recently. “That was the beginning of probably one of the most important friendships of my life.”
The other day, the two friends met me on Zoom to talk about “Suzie.” Piper, who is thirty-eight, arrived a little late in overalls and a slick blond ponytail. “You look very sexy,” Prebble said. Piper replied, “I just got hair and makeuped.” Prebble, who is thirty-nine, has chestnut hair and a chatty, buzzing energy, and was calling from a nearly empty office building in Brooklyn, where she has been working on Season 3 of “Succession.” “Well, you look fucking hot in your production office,” Piper said.
Prebble first met Piper to pitch “Secret Diary,” which she had adapted from a real-life anonymous blog. “I was a bit intimidated, slightly, in a sort of celebrity way,” Prebble recalled. But Piper was on her own, which Prebble was surprised about, “and we just chatted about womanhood and sex work and sexuality and being a woman,” Prebble said. Piper had read her play “The Sugar Syndrome” in preparation. “By the end of the conversation, I was, like, Oh, this is a real artist.” But Prebble and Piper had little control over the final product. “I found myself constantly going, ‘Hang on, I don’t feel like this is right.’ And then a bunch of people would always say, ‘No it’s fine, it’s fine,’ ” Prebble said.
“You weren’t even allowed on set,” Piper added.
“If you did go on set, you had to be specially invited,” Prebble said. “You’re sort of brought on like you’ve won a competition. They bring you a cup of tea, like, O.K., are you happy now? Go away.”
In 2012, Prebble and Piper worked together again on Prebble’s play “The Effect,” about a couple involved in a pharmaceutical trial, at the National Theatre. Afterward, they stayed in touch. They were moving into their early thirties, a “rude awakening,” Piper said, and they spent long periods of time on the phone, counselling each other through those years. They started keeping notes, exchanging written thoughts about their daily lives and ideas for the show in the form of long, brutally honest e-mails. Many of these sentiments wound up in “I Hate Suzie.” “We started to get turned on by some of our sort of awful, sad, hilarious shared emotions,” Piper said. “And it became more obvious what we needed to do in the show.”
They rented a room in London and met every day for several weeks to map out the show. “We would put everything up on the wall,” Prebble said, “story ideas, and character ideas, and thematic ideas.” The trauma of a phone hack seemed to encapsulate the sense of personal crisis they wanted to invoke. “The idea of, What if that secret part of yourself was suddenly available to everybody?” Prebble said. The namesake emotion of each episode tends to shape its style. In “Shock,” Suzie bursts into song. “Denial” takes place away from Suzie’s home, mostly in a hotel room, because “in denial, you go somewhere else completely,” Prebble said. “It became really exciting to me to try and make every episode a bit different emotionally,” Prebble added. “Not necessarily that continuous narrative with an A, B, and a C story that has clarity and consistency, but actually more like looking at a diamond or something, where you’re seeing different faces in the jewel.”
In an episode titled “Shame,” a real-life incident that Prebble wrote to Piper about has made its way into the plot. Suzie’s agent, Naomi, played with no-nonsense warmth by Leila Farzad, is on a train when she realizes that the man sitting next to her is furiously masturbating. She looks away, pretending not to notice. When she gets off, at a busy station in central London, she asks about reporting the crime, and learns it may take hours. “I could just go to the Web site, right? I’ll go to the Web site,” she tells a transport worker, on her way out. Prebble once had a similar experience; she decided not to report it, and was plagued with guilt. “I’ve always thought, I bet that guy just went and wanked loads next to people,” she said. “That’s something I’ve not heard anyone talk about before—the shame of not reporting something.”
Other episodes of the show draw from their professional lives. In “Anger,” a blisteringly comic episode, Suzie, in a bid to rebuild her reputation as a serious actor, takes part in a workshop for a new musical, “The Party of Monica Lewinsky,” by an up-and-coming theatre director who’s “supposed to be stupidly clever.” At the first rehearsal, the director speaks excruciatingly slowly, with long, painful silences between phrases. When Suzie tries to explain that she needs to get home for her son’s birthday party, he looks at her blankly. “We both have our experiences in the theatre, and quite often the directors can be tricky,” Piper said, diplomatically. “And, I mean, Lucy hates anyone who speaks slowly.”
“I do not hate anyone who speaks slowly,” Prebble said, indignantly. In her work, though, she has sometimes observed “an authority that was getting lost in the room from me as a writer, as an author, as a playwright, and often being located in a very silent man near me.” She paused. “And when I would go and work with the very silent man on my own, I’d be like, They just don’t know. They haven’t got anything to say. But that silence is being filled with a projection of authority.” She’s noticed a similar phenomenon among friends who are attracted to a Mr. Darcy type: silent, brooding, possibly empty. “You want to shake them and go, ‘All of the things that you think he has, you have.’ ”
In their long, sometimes rambling, discussions, e-mails, and texts, and during the writing of “I Hate Suzie,” Prebble and Piper often returned to the theme of what it feels like to enter your thirties as a woman. “Pretty much everyone I’ve seen around me has a bit of an identity crisis,” Piper said. Prebble said she saw many women—mostly straight women—around her falling into two camps. “There were the women who got married, and had kids, and did the thing, and then were, like, ‘Oh, shit! I want to get out of it!’ ” And then, “there were women who didn’t get married, didn’t have the kids, didn’t do the thing, who were like, ‘Oh, shit!’ in the other direction.”
Prebble continued, “Your thirties is where, culturally, the expectation is, O.K., now enough of that. Now you are who you are forever.” She called the notion “bonkers.” “It’s crazy to imagine that you would be knowing exactly who you were, doing the job that you should always do, married to the person you’ll never leave,” she said. “It’s crazy.”
“It’s unrealistic,” Piper boomed.
“That’s the conclusion we’ve come to,” Prebble said. “Leave us alone!”
