I Hate Suzie lives inside a feeling most of us, if we’re lucky, only experience for a few panicked seconds at a time. It’s that moment after you hear a bit of Earth-shattering news—when a vacuum seems to form at the back of your throat and the atmosphere around your head seems to thin, leaving you to float in space inside your own body. Everything is too close but also exceedingly far away, and even though your mind is spinning, your feet feel permanently glued to the floor.
Here, the inciting incident is a photo hack. We first meet Suzie Pickles—yes, Suzie Pickles—as she greets a swarm of people who’ve arrived at her home in the English countryside to shoot her for a magazine. As the afternoon wears on and various designers and decorators coat both Suzie and her home in furs, baubles, and fake blood, the actress figures out why loved ones have been blowing up her phone all day. Images have begun circulating online of her performing fellatio on a man who, based on the skin color in the photos, is definitely not her husband.
Cue a futile campaign to gather up all the WiFi modems and phones in the house. If Suzie can just keep everyone from finding out what’s happened, she seems to think, maybe she won’t lose the career opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to play an aging Disney princess. (If it wasn’t clear, this show is a dark comedy.) The camera hovers right in front of Suzie’s face for most of this, crowding her as the claustrophobic dread slowly builds—until she finally explodes, yelling at the photographer to just get the shot and then begging everyone to get the fuck out of her home so she can assess the damage.
Doctor Who and Penny Dreadful alum Billie Piper stars as Suzie and co-created the series with Succession writer and playwright Lucy Prebble. The two first collaborated on the ITV2 series The Secret Diary of a Call Girl in 2007, and again in Prebble’s 2012 play The Effect. During a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Piper said she spent years sending Prebble ideas for new TV projects, only to be shot down again and again.
“We were sort of in contact every day like lovers throughout our late twenties, early thirties,” Piper said. “We realized the things we were saying to each other were really exposing, often quite dark, and always hilarious. We share a sort of sick sense of humor.”
Eventually, the two realized that their musings could become something more. In its early stages, I Hate Suzie would have been a friendship-based series—and to an extent, it still is. Suzie and her manager, Naomi (Leila Farzad), have been friends since childhood, when Suzie first became famous on a televised singing competition. Their codependency—and its inherent toxicity—is just one of many things Suzie must eventually reevaluate in her life.
But Prebble was determined to find something bigger—to put a spin on the idea that hadn’t already been seen before on television. That, Piper said, is when Prebble came up with the hack.
“That felt like a way for us to talk about all of the things we wanted to talk about,” she said. “All of the axes we wanted to grind.”
Then came the second epiphany: using eight stages of grief to structure the season. Each episode focuses on one emotion as Suzie’s life slowly unravels—shock, denial, shame, bargaining... You get it.
I Hate Suzie feels spiritually linked to Fleabag and, more recently, I May Destroy You—both of which unpack the messy lives and traumas of equally messy women with nuance and empathy. Suzie Pickles, like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” and Michaela Coel’s Arabella, is prone to self sabotage but also deeply legible as a character. We understand her choices, even when they are the wrong ones—largely because, given the options she’s got, it’s not too hard to imagine making most of them ourselves.
It can be tempting to read into the biographical similarities between Suzie and Piper. After all, Piper began her career as a pop star just like Suzie did—and she, like her character, played a beloved role in a massively popular sci-fi franchise. But the actress says those parallels are nothing to read into; the choice to make Suzie famous, she said, was more metaphorical.
Thanks to social media, most of us are “famous” in our own circles to one degree or another—and all of us likely have information on our phones that we’d prefer to keep private.
Actress Billie Piper
David M. Benett/Getty“Like, imagine if someone went through your notes,” Piper said. “Notes, for me, is the one I hide deep within my phone.” To be clear, the actress would prefer none of her private information or photos be hacked—“but the Notes are the thing I want to guard with my life.”
Making Suzie an actress simply ups the stakes and allows the series to plunge into the at times absurd world of show business and sci-fi conventions—where, it’s worth noting, she does, indeed, get into a fair amount of trouble. (Read: Cocaine. Lots of cocaine.) “It allowed us to open the world up a lot more,” Piper said, “so it’s not just a domestic situation.”
But speaking of Suzie’s domestic situation: Alongside Piper and Farzad, the other powerhouse performance in I Hate Suzie belongs to Daniel Ings, who gradually reveals the monstrous depths of Suzie’s seemingly harmless husband Cob.
At first, Cob just seems like any other pitiable husband—but over time, we see how he’s slowly worn Suzie down, preying on her deferential nature and seizing every opportunity to tear her down. Ings brings a quiet fury to Suzie’s home life—turning their idyllic country home into something of a Gothic nightmare.
“The reason we cast him was because his audition tape was so angry and unrefined, in a way, and so porous, and big, and un-judgmental,” Piper said of Ings. “He wasn’t sort of an actor remarking on the character, or trying to make the character more likable for the viewer, or trying to make the viewer understand his conundrum.”
“So often actors do that, and it’s something I find so boring, and such a wasted opportunity,” Piper continued. “Like, why don’t you want to just blow the fucking roof off and show them what it is—what it actually is? He was able to do that, and he wanted to do it as well.”
The arguments with Cob are just one of a thousand intense, bizarre moments we follow Suzie through during eight half-hour episodes. There are coke binges, fantastical masturbation sequences, and even a musical number or two along the way as well. With each episode, it becomes clearer what we are watching—a slow-simmering nervous breakdown. By the time Suzie really loses it—in an incident that, once again, plays out across the pages of tabloids—it’s mostly a marvel she’s made it so long without ranting and raving in the street in her sweats and a pair of fuzzy boots.
Billie Piper in I Hate Suzie
HBO MaxThat might be why, for me personally, the crowning moment of the entire series comes when Suzie storms out of a rehearsal with a condescending, blowhard director—singing her way out the door on a passionately delivered, wonderfully melismatic “Fuuuuck... youuuuuu!”
When asked if she’s had any such moments during her career, Piper replied that “sadly” she hasn’t had enough of them. She’s wanted to pull a justified stunt like that on several occasions, she said, but never had the confidence to do it. Now, though? “I think I’m past it.”
“It’s so satisfying to pretend doing that that doing it actually is definitely worth the punt,” Piper has decided. “I think I’m gonna really invest in just fucking having it with people.” (Not unfairly, she clarifies; “it should be justified.”)
After all, she says, that is the real point of this show: “Imagine if we had the balls as women, without years of sort of conditioning, and being shiny and polite and easy to get along with, and employable, and all that shit that you have to do to get seen and heard,” Piper said. “Imagine if we didn’t do that for a day.”
