“Kneel”: hot priests and confessional affect in Fleabag

The BBC-Amazon drama Fleabag (2016–19) received increased attention in its second series for the introduction of the so-called ‘hot’ priest. This article argues that Priest is one of several additions to the second series of the show that confirms and extends creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s interest in and use of and confession, which is broad and secular in the first series and institutional in the second. Following Anna Poletti in pointing to the normative affects upheld by confession and, as I argue, all ‘hot’ TV priests, this article suggests that Fleabag’s use of the supposedly transgressive mechanism of confession is conservative, privileging confession as a feminist form of truth production and testimony, but failing to account for the ways in which confession reinforces troubling binaries of guilt and salvation, sick and healed, oppressed, and liberated.