Ten years ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge locked eyes with the camera and asked her audience: "Do I have a massive arsehole?"
That line, from a monologue about a booty call gone wrong, announced her as a new star of British television.
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The half-hour comedy series Fleabag broke the fourth wall and became a cultural phenomenon.
Its second season was even bigger, spawning thinkpieces about the "hot priest" played by Andrew Scott and a sold-out Topshop jumpsuit.
Fleabag secured Waller-Bridge an exclusive deal with Amazon worth a reported $20 million a year. But how did it change TV?
The Rise of Female-Authored Comedy
In the mid-2010s, pop feminism was everywhere, but not on British TV.
A report by the Writers' Guild of Great Britain found that from 2001 to 2016, only 14% of primetime TV was written by women, and just 11% in sitcoms.
"We knew the gender balance was horrific," said Chris Sussman, former BBC comedy commissioner.
Things were already shifting. Lena Dunham's Girls premiered in 2012, creating an appetite for bawdy, awkward, vulnerable comedy.
Fleabag was part of a wave that included Catastrophe, Back to Life, and This Way Up. But Fleabag cut through in a way many contemporaries didn't.
"Fleabag was smoothly incorporated into that massive post-Girls cycle of unruly middle-class white women comedy," said Faye Woods, associate professor at the University of Reading.
Shows like Alma's Not Normal and Chewing Gum, while acclaimed, didn't travel as widely.
