TV Rewind: Max’s Underrated I Hate Suzie Is a Pitch-Perfect Commentary on Celebrity Meltdowns

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

Is there anything more entertaining than a famous woman having a mental breakdown? If you’ve been a part of pop culture the past few decades, the answer is no. Even the most esteemed media consumers can’t help becoming vultures when they see a woman make a spectacle of herself. It brings out the worst of us all, the audience at the circus hoping to see the lion tamer get mauled just to prove the arena has stakes.

I Hate Suzie is about Suzie Pickles, a B-list British celebrity experiencing what it’s like to be obsessively loathed. After a nude photo leak reveals compromising photos (and her infidelity to her husband), Suzie descends into a modern madness.

The series, created by Succession writer Lucy Prebble and starring actress Billie Piper, flew under the radar during its run (especially in the U.S.) Drawing off of Piper’s real life rise to fame, I Hate Suzie is one of the funniest and most vicious commentaries of modern celebrity and the depravity of entertainment ever put to the small screen. 

In the first season, each episode depicts Suzie in a different state of trauma from the incident. The claustrophobic first episode shows Suzie trying to conduct an idyllic tour of her house to a TV crew as the news slowly breaks. From there, things get worse. In the second episode she denies the photos are of her (on stage at a science fiction convention of course, drawing on Piper’s past starring role as Rose Tyler on Doctor Who). Her life becomes an evolving selection of overwhelming unescapable emotions. All the while, she lives under a public eye that will not look away.

I Hate Suzie reckons with the celebrity as a person versus as a figure to obsess over. Suzie faces real problems in her life, her relationship with her husband fractures, she tries to focus on parenting her deaf son, and her friendship with her best friend/agent is often contentious. During the Season 1 episode “Guilt,” we see Suzie return to her middle class home where her traumatic lack of privacy is a source of laughs and even her family is willing to take advantage of her fame for money.

Suzie feels like the world has turned against her—and it has. The momentous presence of her fame follows her everywhere, even when she tries to go home. But I Hate Suzie does not depict Suzie as just a helpless victim thrust into infamy. Suzie is a narcissist. She’s a bad friend and a disloyal wife. She lies and cheats often without regard. She is the world’s dream woman to hate.

There’s something refreshing about a show not afraid to let a woman be horrible in the way the media often lets men be. Suzie engages in careless vices that wouldn’t phase any viewers if she were a famous man. But I Hate Suzie is not about if Suzie is a “bad person,” a question that is ultimately worthless. The series instead puts the audience in her shoes. How would you feel if your privacy was erased?  If every move you made was analyzed? And every “bad” decision was just further justification for treating you as the worst person in the world?

If I Hate Suzie was just its first season that wrestled with these elements, then it would be great. But Season 2 (titled I Hate Suzie Too) kicks its concept into high gear. You thought you saw crazy? You thought you saw a woman having a breakdown? That was just the opener, now we’re in the real circus.

In I Hate Suzie Too, Suzie takes the next logical step of any famous person going through public turmoil and she enters into a celebrity dance competition show. A tried and true method that has been attempted by everyone from Sean Spicer and Ryan Lochte to Olivia Jade and Carole Baskin. The season puts Suzie’s figurative fight for approval from the rest of the world to a literal popularity contest on the series Dance Crazee, where she must dance for the cameras to prove that she is worthy of not being despised.

Season 2 is where I Hate Suzie relishes in the horror of its presence. Its commentary becomes even funnier and sharper. The opening scene depicts Suzie performing in clown makeup and costume, and Prebble described this to Vulture by saying “Clowns are scary or funny; in patriarchal terms, we don’t like to think of women as scary or funny.” Suzie tries to hide her womanhood, identifying it as a primary motivator for scorn from the world. But if the world hates women, what it hates even more is a woman trying to disguise herself as something else (Suzie dramatically loses the vote).

What follows is a three-episode surreal-horror Christmas special. The glitz of entertainment gets shinier, the colors get brighter, and the show pushes and pushes until Suzie reaches the ultimate public breaking point. It’s a brilliant statement on the prison of an all-consuming obsession with performance that finally tears someone down until they’re completely fractured. I Hate Suzie Too accomplishes more in its three episodes than many streaming shows achieve in one whole season.

Throughout the series, Piper positions herself as a force to be reckoned with. Her past as a child star-turned sci-fi actress-turned theater performer allows her to draw from every possible experience of fame to craft one captivating performance. Prebble and Piper’s experience in entertainment make I Hate Suzie feel frighteningly realistic while still finding the dark comedy in someone’s life being ruined while dancing in clown makeup. 

The first season of I Hate Suzie premiered in 2020 during peak COVID and the second season at the end of 2022 as a Christmas special. These timings unfortunately allowed the show to get lost in the shuffle of overloaded media moments. But what was buried was a brilliant and artistic take on the perils of fame. I Hate Suzie deserves to be in the conversation with shows like Barry and Bojack Horseman for its modern take on the horrors of entertainment and celebrity. It’s visceral, funny, stunningly directed, and even comes complete with an homage to All That Jazz.

Celebrity breakdowns can feel so entertaining because they’re happening at such a distance. Celebrities don’t feel like real people anymore, they’re pretty faces we see through a lens. The series draws off the lives of real celebrities (the Britney Spears allusions are most obvious, but there’s also bits of everyone from Amy Winehouse to Kristen Stewart). I Hate Suzie forces its viewers to confront the fact that they exist in the same world as the people they’re consuming. Suzie’s reality is fractured and theatrical, but in the text of the show, she is as real as anyone ogling her. The name of the show itself makes its viewers complicit in Suzie’s demise: We are the one watching. We are the ones laughing.

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Leila Jordan is a writer and former jigsaw puzzle world record holder. Her work has appeared in Paste Magazine, the LA Times, Gold Derby, TheWrap, FOX Digital, The Spool, and Awards Radar. To talk about all things movies, TV, and useless trivia you can find her @galaxyleila

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