It’s Official, The Best Fleabag Replacement Is Returning For Season 3

Television has spent nearly a decade searching for the next Fleabag. The comparison now gets attached to almost every British comedy featuring a damaged woman, a disastrous sex life, and enough self-awareness to leave no apologies in her wake. Most of those shows have very little in common with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s masterpiece beyond an accent and a willingness to make their female leads lovably unlovable.

Such Brave Girls actually earns the comparison. Created by and starring Kat Sadler, the BBC and Hulu comedy occupies the same uncomfortable space between trauma and hilarity. With a sensibility cut from the same cloth as the raw, auteur-driven projects championed by A24, the series moves past mimicking damaged woman tropes; it dissects the archetype, then guts it like a fish. Its characters are selfish, needy, dishonest, sexually confused, and often appalling to the people who love them. And yet, they remain impossible to abandon.

The series has also accomplished something surprisingly difficult in the current streaming landscape: It has received universal critical praise without becoming a mainstream hit. Both seasons hold 100% scores on Rotten Tomatoes, while the first season won the 2024 BAFTA for Best Scripted Comedy. Sadler also received BAFTA’s Emerging Talent: Fiction award for her work on the show.

Now, the window for catching up is officially open. The BBC commissioned Such Brave Girls Season 3 in May 2026, ordering another six episodes about the spectacularly dysfunctional Johnson family. There is no confirmed release date yet, but the renewal offers a welcome excuse to discover the best dark comedy far too many viewers have missed.

Why Such Brave Girls Is The Best Fleabag Replacement On TV

At the center of Such Brave Girls are sisters Josie and Billie Johnson, played by Sadler and her real-life sister, Lizzie Davidson. They live with their mother, Deb, played by Sherlock actor Louise Brealey, in a cramped and increasingly precarious home after the family patriarch abandons them.

Each woman has developed her own terrible strategy for surviving. Josie struggles with depression, her sexuality, and a relationship she cannot seem to escape. Billie looks for validation from men who barely tolerate her. Deb is determined to secure financial stability through her boyfriend, Dev, even when doing so requires manipulating everyone around her.

Sadler initially presents the Johnsons as exaggerated sitcom monsters. Deb attempts to impress Dev by pretending her absent husband is dead. Billie attends an abortion appointment without changing out of the witch costume she wears at work. Josie’s family treats her mental health as an inconvenience that might interfere with Deb’s romantic prospects.

The extremity of those situations makes the comedy hit, but the emotions beneath them are recognizable. All three women are terrified of being unwanted. They simply express that fear through cruelty, delusion, emotional blackmail, and some of the worst relationship decisions ever captured on television.

That is where the Fleabag comparison becomes useful. Both shows refuse to turn troubled women into inspirational figures whose suffering exists to produce an uplifting lesson. They allow their characters to remain selfish and sexually messy without withdrawing the audience’s sympathy.

However, Such Brave Girls offers none of the intimacy that Waller-Bridge creates by having Fleabag address the camera. There is no secret conversation between Josie and the audience and no private escape hatch from her family. Every insecurity is dragged into the open, misinterpreted, and used against her.

Fleabag is ultimately a confession. Such Brave Girls is a hostage situation.

Such Brave Girls Turns Rock Bottom Into A Punchline

The following contains spoilers for Such Brave Girls Seasons 1 and 2 and references to suicide and abortion.

Most comedies introduce dysfunction and then gradually uncover the affection holding the family together. Such Brave Girls takes the opposite route. Josie, Billie, and Deb clearly love one another, but they express it through insults, manipulation, denial, and an almost supernatural ability to make every crisis worse.

Nothing is treated as too serious for comedy. And no topics are off-limits—a beacon of light in an era of television that often feels overly sanitized and risk-averse. Josie’s depression and psychiatric hospitalization become inconveniences her family would rather ignore. Billie goes through an abortion while still measuring the experience by what it means for her relationship with Nicky. Deb invents a dead husband to connect with a widower, then keeps the lie alive even when it becomes nearly impossible to maintain.

The series never argues that these situations are inherently funny. The comedy comes from the Johnson family’s breathtakingly inappropriate responses to them.

The show’s treatment of these subjects could easily feel cruel in less capable hands. However, creator Kat Sadler draws from her own experiences with serious mental illness, while her real-life sister and co-star Lizzie Davidson brought elements of her financial struggles to the series. Their willingness to expose the least flattering parts of themselves gives the comedy an honesty that simple shock humor would lack.

Sadler does not ask viewers to admire the Johnsons for surviving their trauma. She lets them be petty, destructive, and embarrassingly desperate while they survive it. That may be the show’s most radical quality. These women do not become inspirational merely because terrible things have happened to them, and greater self-awareness rarely results in better behavior.

Such Brave Girls Season 3 Makes Now The Perfect Time To Catch Up

The third season will once again consist of six episodes written by Sadler and directed by Simon Bird, best known to many viewers as Will from The Inbetweeners. Bird’s restrained direction keeps the focus on the performances, allowing the most disturbing punchlines to land without announcing themselves.

Specific story details have not been released, and the BBC has yet to confirm when the new season will arrive. Season 2 leaves the family facing another major threat to its already unstable existence, giving the writers plenty of room to make their circumstances worse.

That is the only reliable prediction anyone can make about Such Brave Girls: Whatever happens next will probably be disastrous, inappropriate, and painfully funny.

Viewers looking for another polished comedy about an endearingly flawed woman may find Such Brave Girls considerably more abrasive than expected. This is a series about people who recognize their destructive patterns, explain them with impressive accuracy, and then repeat them anyway.

That may also be why the show feels so honest. Healing is rarely linear, families rarely become functional after one sincere conversation, and self-awareness does not automatically make anyone behave better. Such Brave Girls finds the joke in the distance between knowing what is wrong and having absolutely no intention of fixing it. With Season 3 now official, there has never been a better time to enter the Johnson household. Just do not expect anyone inside to emerge improved.