Fleabag turns ten this year, marking a decade since Phoebe Waller-Bridge's confessional, fourth-wall-breaking comedy transformed British television and turned its creator into a major industry figure. The article examines whether the show's success genuinely opened doors for female showrunners across the industry, or whether it merely represented one high-profile success within a broader, still-fragile movement now under threat from streamers' budget cuts and risk-averse commissioning.

Fleabag emerged as part of a wave of semi-autobiographical, writer-performer-led comedies following Lena Dunham's Girls (2012), alongside shows such as Catastrophe, Back to Life and This Way Up, at a time when a Writers' Guild of Great Britain report found only 14% of primetime UK television between 2001 and 2016 was written by women, dropping to 11% in sitcoms. Its second series proved a cultural phenomenon, driving discussion of Andrew Scott's "hot priest" character and securing Waller-Bridge a reported $20m (£16m)-a-year exclusive deal with Amazon, though the piece questions how much lasting change this individual triumph delivered for women in television more broadly.