I Hate Suzie

Lore & Background

I Hate Suzie was created by Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper, marking their third collaboration after Secret Diary of a Call Girl and The Effect. The series was produced by Bad Wolf in association with Sky Studios. The inspiration came from the frequent correspondence between Prebble and Piper, who shared struggles of identity and womanhood. Prebble structured the story around an idea of eight stages of trauma or grief, a take on the five stages of grief, with each episode focusing on one stage and designed to feel like a standalone mini-film.

Reader's Guide

The series received critical acclaim for its writing, directing, and Billie Piper's performance. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 95% approval rating based on 37 reviews, with the critical consensus praising it as a ruthless satire on stardom. Metacritic assigned a score of 85 out of 100, indicating universal acclaim. It was recognized by several publications as one of the best television programmes of the year. The show became Sky Atlantic's second most-viewed show for the third quarter of 2020, behind the miniseries The Third Day. Its legacy lies in its innovative structure and unflinching portrayal of celebrity trauma.

Did You Know?

• Each episode of I Hate Suzie is focused on one of eight stages of trauma, a take on the five stages of grief.
• The series was filmed on location in and around London, with some exterior scenes shot in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.
• The musical score was composed by Johnny Lloyd and Nathan Coen. Johnny Lloyd also composed the score for Billie Piper's directorial debut Rare Beasts.
• The premiere episode 'Shock' received an overnight rating of 95,000 viewers, rising to 987,000 after twenty-eight days.

The Prebble-Piper Partnership

I Hate Suzie stands as the third creative partnership between writer Lucy Prebble and actress-director Billie Piper, a collaboration that stretches back to the late 2000s. Their earlier work together included the long-running series Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007–2011) and the 2012 drama The Effect, projects that forged a close personal friendship between the two women. It was Piper who first voiced her desire to tackle another project with Prebble, and the seed of the show grew organically from their ongoing correspondence. The two would regularly exchange messages about the pressures of identity and the complexities of womanhood, and Prebble distilled those conversations into a narrative centred on a phone hack. She then devised a structural framework she described as "eight stages of trauma or grief," a deliberate expansion of the well-known five stages of grief model. Each episode was designed to carry the texture of a self-contained mini-film, giving the series a distinctive episodic rhythm that sets it apart from conventional television storytelling.

Narrative Architecture

At its core, I Hate Suzie follows Suzie Pickles, a former teenage pop star turned television actress, whose carefully maintained public persona shatters when her phone is hacked and intimate photographs are leaked online. The series, produced by Bad Wolf in association with Sky Studios, is a dark comedy-drama that tracks Suzie's desperate attempts to hold her personal life together while the digital storm rages around her. She fights to preserve her marriage to Cob, played by Daniel Ings, and to shield her deaf son Frank, portrayed by Matthew Jordan-Caws. Running parallel to Suzie's crisis is the storyline of Naomi Jones, her manager and close friend (Leila Farzad), who scrambles to keep Suzie's career from collapsing entirely. The show's structure is deliberately unconventional: rather than following a traditional arc, each episode is anchored to one of eight distinct stages of trauma, a concept Prebble developed as a reinterpretation of the classic grief model. This gives the narrative a fragmented, emotionally raw quality that mirrors the disorientation of its protagonist.

Critical Acclaim & Audience Response

I Hate Suzie was met with near-universal critical praise upon its 2020 release. On Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 95 percent approval rating based on 37 reviews, with an average score of 8.1 out of 10. The site's consensus highlights Piper's "manic performance" as the engine driving what critics called a "ruthless satire on stardom." Metacritic's weighted average of 85 out of 100, drawn from 11 critics, classified the first season as receiving "Universal acclaim." Individual reviews were equally generous: The Telegraph awarded a full five stars, The Guardian called it "a wild ride that feels like an absolute gift," and Entertainment Weekly gave it an "A," framing it as a "bloody brilliant exploration of modern womanhood." Audience numbers told a similar story. The premiere episode drew 95,000 viewers overnight, climbing to 532,000 within a week and reaching nearly one million viewers within a month. The show became Sky Atlantic's second most-watched title for the third quarter of 2020, trailing only The Third Day. In February 2021, the series was renewed for a second season.

Production Craft & Global Reach

The production of I Hate Suzie was a carefully coordinated effort that blended location shooting with a distinctive musical identity. Interior scenes were filmed entirely on location across London, while select exterior sequences were captured at Park Avenue and Mimms Hall Road in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. One notable set piece—the sci-fi convention scene in the episode "Denial"—was shot at ExCeL London during the MCM London Comic Con in October 2019. The score was composed by Johnny Lloyd and Nathan Coen, who had previously collaborated with Piper on her directorial debut Rare Beasts. Coen noted that he and Lloyd began developing musical ideas before the series' visual form was even settled, sending early sketches to Prebble while she was still writing. Lloyd described the scoring process as particularly challenging because each episode needed to embody a different emotional register while maintaining continuity across the season. The finished product found a wide international audience: after its Sky Atlantic and Now debut on 27 August 2020, the series rolled out to Stan in Australia, HBO Max in the United States, Warner TV across Latin America, and Globoplay in Brazil, with the second series arriving in December 2022.