【Watch Bikini Pirates (2006)】

NEW YORK -- Phoebe Waller-Bridge's new show Fleabag is being described as everything from "millennial Bridget Jones" to British Broad City.

Yes,Watch Bikini Pirates (2006) the lead is British. And spoiler: She's also very funny.

But the new Amazon comedy -- which became available to stream on Friday -- wasn't inspired by the pop culture that came before it. It was actually influenced by feminism, and the debates Waller-Bridge and her friends had about what it means to be a modern woman in her 20s.

She turned the idea into a one-woman show about an unfiltered, dry-witted woman who hurls herself at modern living in London as she deals with the loss of her best friend, a breakup, and financial troubles at her café. It got noticed by a BBC commissioner at the Edinburgh Festival -- and two years later, Amazon picked it up as a six-part series.

"When I first wrote the play, I was feeling really ragey and really angry," Waller-Bridge told Mashablein a recent phone interview from London. "I wasn’t entirely sure why, but I just sort of felt there was so much responsibility to be confident and sexy, and satisfied with my choices. Everyone having these fierce debates about feminism that just really confused me. Amongst all the debates, there was voice in me going, ‘what the f--k is everyone talking about?’"

Turns out, a lot of Waller-Bridges' friends felt the same confusion -- they just didn't know how to express it.

"When I was talking to my girlfriends about how I felt, we just started making each other laugh," Waller-Bridge said. "But it was like no one could make us feel better about how confusing it was to be a woman in her 20s."

Adapting the play wasn't easy, however. At one point, Waller-Bridge even considered making it a movie instead of a series.

She also had to actually cast other actors, since she was normally the one playing everyone in the stage production.

The most difficult task, however, was figuring out what the relationship between the audience and Fleabag was going to be.

"So much of the play relies on the fact that everything she tells you is everything you know about that world," Waller-Bridge said. "You see everything through her -- and suddenly when it’s dramatized, she hides a lot of the truth. So with the series, I lost a lot of the tension because she can’t control that. I had to come up with the relationship with the audience in the world rather than just it being reported to the audience."

Much of that meant figuring out the right moments for the leading lady to talk directly to the camera (viewers).

"I realized her relationship with her camera was a realrelationship, like she wants the audience to feel like they are complicit, and they are friends with her, Waller-Bridge said.

Honest, uncensored portrayals of women in their 20s have indeed become more common than ever on screen, thanks in large part to Lena Dunham's HBO hit Girls.

Waller-Bridge believes that topic is a relatable premise can be explored in many different ways.

With Fleabag, it comes through most clearly with Waller-Bridge's character. For example, there's a line in the series in which she says, "I just want to cry all the time."

"You can’tdo that all the time," Waller-Bridge said of that desire. "And even though you can see she -- Fleabag-- isin pain, and damaged and detached at the same time, she manages to keep up this front. I think that's what people relate to."

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