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I Hate Suzie comes to us from Succession writer Lucy Prebble and former pop star Billie Piper, and it’s an interesting look at someone who has been in the public eye for a long time, but not super-famous. She’s just famous enough, though, to get her phone hacked and have the photos that are downloaded ruin her life if they go public. It sure won’t be pretty, but how will Suzie Pickles (played by Piper) get her life back?
I HATE SUZIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “Twenty years ago.” We see a girl singing during a TV talent contest a la Pop Idol. When a judge asks the girl her name, she says “Suzie Pickles”. The judge tells her that’s the last time someone will ask her that, because she’s going to be a star.
The Gist: In the current day, Suzie (Billie Piper) is reasonably well-known, though she may not have the career she envisioned. She’s the star of a TV series, and she lives in a large but not ostentatious country house with her husband Cob Betterton (Daniel Ings) and their son Frank (Matthew Jordan-Caws). She’s just been offered a part as a Disney princess for a film where the princess is apparently pushing 40 (“That’s part of the joke,” she tells Cob). Everything seems to be going well.
Then she sees a news report that a hacker has compromising photos of her that will be released that day, and she’s sent into a spiral. One problem: She not only scheduled her cleaning lady to come that day, but a photo shoot is scheduled for the exact same time. So, during a frenzy of activity, where the cleaning lady cleans around a massive crew bringing in equipment and props and a couple of big shaggy dogs, Suzie tries to keep her son off his tablet, and turns off her phone. But when her manager Naomi (Leila Farzad) calls with the news she already knows, she spirals some more, because she knows what photos are on her phone and prays that they won’t come out.
Then the photos come out, and Cob is horrified to find out that not only are the photos of a sexual nature but they are pretty obviously not of him and they’re not that old. Once Naomi sees them, her aggressive stance towards Cob’s stance eases. Meanwhile, the silly photo shoot continues, with Suzie being given a vintage fur that gets splashed with red dye to signify blood. Then the doorbell rings again; Cob has hired a locksmith to change the locks on all the doors. His anger is only starting to grow.
After everyone on the shoot finally leaves, Cob locks her out of the house when she steps outside. She tells Frank to get her her phone, just so she can see the photos for herself. But the battery runs out, and she wanders the village where she lives, wearing the fur and photo makeup, hating herself and everything around her.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The frenziness of the first episode seems more like something you’d see on an action show like Bodyguard than on a dramedy.
Our Take: Lucy Prebble (Succession) created I Hate Suzie with Piper, which explains the general feeling of uneasiness we felt during the entire first episode. We get enough of a glimpse of Suzie’s life before the hacked photos are released to know that her life seems to be in a peak at that moment. Sure, things aren’t all peachy, as Cob wants to prepare Frank for his mother being gone for a couple of months; he’s likely annoyed at her lack of foresight when it comes to their family. But for the most part, things are looking grand for Suzie, after what has probably been an up and down couple of decades.
But the series, whose episodes are named after the stages of grief (“Shock” and “Denial” are the first two episodes) will be about how Suzie desperately tries to get that life back, working through the destruction that the hack left in its wake. What we hope to see is Suzie coming to the realization that, while the hack blew things up, her actions are what has really been the destructive force in her life. Perhaps it’ll be a funny journey, a dramatic one or both. But we need to see that level of self-awareness to not consider Suzie any more than a caricature.
Piper has to play a lot of Suzie’s emotions in this first episode nonverbally, and she makes it look easy, as she cycles through the worry and tries to generate fake smiles during the photo shoot. And, while some of her behavior seems a bit ridiculous, it does reflect a person whose life is rapidly melting down. If the first episode got you as anxious as it did us, with its twirling soundtrack, long tracking shots reflecting Suzie’s state of mind, then Prebble, Piper and director Georgi Banks-Davies have done their job. What we hope is that things calm down a bit as Suzie reacts, reflects and rebuilds.
Sex and Skin: Besides the talk about what’s in the pictures, there’s nothing.
Parting Shot: Suzie and Naomi sit back on the couch that’s in Suzie’s outdoor lounge and both think of what to do next. The word “SHOCK” appears to reiterate what this episode was about.
Sleeper Star: We’ll see more of Farzad as Naomi in later episodes, helping Suzie navigate this hit to her life and career. We enjoyed the couple of scenes she was in, especially when she challenged Cob’s anger — at least before she saw what she saw in the pictures.
Most Pilot-y Line: A lot of the dialogue is said in a mumbling fashion. That might be considered “naturalistic,” but to these middle-aged ears, “naturalistic” means “not understood.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of I Hate Suzie was an effective exercise in seeing a person’s life fall apart around them in short order. But we’re really intrigued with seeing Piper’s interpretation of how Suzie tries to put the pieces back together.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
