On Thursday, I started Netflix's The Politician and I genuinely thought I would never find a better show. What could be better than this: biting wit, American politics, incredibly over the top costumes, Gwyneth Paltrow being full Gwyneth, Ben Platt singing. I was existing in this new glorious world Ryan Murphy constructed, blissfully unaware that my next binge watch would upend everything.

I started the first episode of Fleabag at the tail end of the summer after nearly every podcast I listen to mentioned it, every comedian I liked claimed to be addicted to it, and the Emmy panels nominated it for what seemed like every award. So I gave it a go on the TV in the family room in the center of my house. Watch the first five minutes of Fleabag and let me know how you think that went.

Needless to say, I put the show on pause. Until that Sunday night.

By nature, the show is ripe for binging. There are only two seasons, six episodes each, 25-minute episodes. Beginning to end, you could get it over with in just five hours. But "getting it over with" is the most disrespectful way to discuss this show. Fleabag is a show that, in some asinine way, is universally applicable to so many lives. I personally am not a sex-crazed, chain-smoking, 30-something cafe owner living in the heart of London, but I watched that show fully convinced that Phoebe Waller-Bridge was inside of my inner psyche.

Let me explain: there are certain books and movies I have found that somehow get at the unconscious experience of being a woman. Other than my proximity to and familiarity with New York City, I had no connection to the world of Sweetbitter; I have fortunately never joined a cult -much less the Manson family- and I did not live in California in the '70s, as the characters in Emma Cline's The Girls did; nothing in my life correlates with that of the movie Uptown Girls. And yet in each of them, I saw myself. I saw thoughts I had vocalized, feelings I had never had the words for expressed; it was like watching a mirror, albeit a funhouse one with tweaks and distortions.

Fleabag is immediately hysterical then, just when you get comfortable, it slaps you in the face to remind you that the real world sucks. It's not a show to lose yourself in because it never lets you get too far away. Around hour ⅗ of the binge, it becomes hard to figure out if your tears are from laughing or crying. (The same thing can not be said of the last five minutes of the series finale. I'm not a Psych major but I'm pretty sure if you don't cry during the final scene of Fleabag, that's a sign you're a psychopath.) It's the television equivalent of a meme that attacks you in such a way you're not convinced your friend didn't make it just to mess with you.

In essence, Fleabag is good because it's not trying to be, like when your hair looks better at the end of a busy day than when you do it to go to dinner. It's like being a woman, being a human, and what it means to know and exist with other humans in this world. In essence, it's worth 5 hours of your time.