Open your Christmas TV guide this year and, amid all the wholesome dramas, jolly comedies and gooey romcoms, you’ll find a glaring anomaly.
I Hate Suzie, Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper’s brutally frank and funny 2020 tragicomedy about the undoing of an actor named Suzie Pickles (played by Piper), is getting the Christmas treatment on Sky Atlantic.
The three-part 'anti-Christmas Christmas Special', written by Prebble, will see child star turned actress Suzie Pickles (Piper) navigate a new agent, new PR and a new job – a Saturday night reality TV competition, dancing for likes on ‘Dance Crazee’. Having lost everyone close to her, Suzie returns to her first love – the public.
The series, created by Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper, follows the unravelling of the titular Suzie (Piper), an actress who becomes the victim of a phone hack where her intimate pictures are leaked online.
The series also starred Leila Farzad (Innocent) as Suzie’s best friend turned manager Naomi, Daniel Ings (The Crown) as Suzie’s husband Cob and Nathaniel Martello-White (Small Axe) as Carter, the director who is revealed to be having a passionate affair with Suzie.
“When there’s so much television around, there is a danger that you start to passively, even unconsciously, copy tropes. And you begin to think that that’s what’s right,” she says.
“But actually, it’s not. It’s just what’s familiar, and that doesn’t necessarily make it true or good”.
Having created her first television show at only 26, and now executive producing and writing on Succession, one of the most talked about series of the past few years, Prebble is an expert at creating compelling drama.
I Hate Suzie follows Suzie Pickles (Piper), a celebrity whose career is put in jeopardy when she becomes the victim of a hacking scandal that causes a compromising photo of herself to be leaked.
The eight-part series follows Suzie’s excruciating journey to hold her life together alongside her best friend and manager Naomi (Farzad), as she struggles to keep her career afloat and her marriage to her husband, Cob (Ings), begins to hang by a thread.
