After the all-conquering success of Fleabag — her brilliant dark comedy about a smart but rudderless young woman in London — Phoebe Waller-Bridge could presumably have done whatever she wanted for her next TV project. And what she wanted to do next, it now turns out, is very odd indeed.
Killing Eve (BBC1, Saturday) — which Waller-Bridge has adapted from a novel by Luke Jennings but doesn’t appear in — has its moments of recognisably ordinary life. But not many. Near the beginning, for example, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) woke with a Saturday-morning hangover and unwelcome memories of her karaoke performance the night before. Yet within minutes she’d been called into work — which in her case meant arriving at MI5 to be informed that a sex-trafficking Russian politician had just been assassinated in Vienna by having his femoral artery sliced as he walked home with his glamour-model junkie girlfriend Kasia.
As the hangover gags continued, Eve had a sudden hunch that the killer must be a woman.
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