I Hate Suzie

Following their collaboration on Secret Diary of a Call Girl and The Effect, Prebble and Piper developed a close friendship.[1] Piper expressed interest to Prebble in working together on another project.[2] The inspiration for the story came from the frequent correspondence between the two, who would share their struggles of identity and womanhood.[1] Prebble came up with the idea for a story centered around a phone hack.[2] She 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 of the stages.[2] Each episode was created to have the feel of a standalone mini-film.[2]

Interior scenes for I Hate Suzie were mostly filmed at Bad Wolf Studios in Cardiff, South Wales. Some exterior scenes were shot on-location at Park Avenue and Mimms Hall Road in the town Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.[3] For the episode "Denial", scenes featuring Suzie and Naomi at a sci-fi convention were filmed at the ExCeL London during the MCM London Comic Con in October 2019.[4]

The musical score to I Hate Suzie was composed by Johnny Lloyd and Nathan Coen, who previously worked with Piper on her directorial debut Rare Beasts.[5] "Before we even knew what the series was gonna look like, we were already kind of pulling together ideas and sending them to Lucy [Prebble] while she was writing it," Coen said.[5] Lloyd described the process of scoring as "challenging" to create continuity and embody different emotions each episode.[5]

The premiere episode "Shock" received an overnight rating of 95,000 viewers across two screenings.[9] After seven days, the ratings rose to 532,000.[10] Twenty-eight days later, the episode's ratings rose to a total of 987,000 viewers, including 41,000 watching from other devices.[10] The show became Sky Atlantic's second most-viewed show for the third quarter of 2020, behind the miniseries The Third Day.[11]

Piper's performance was praised by critics.

I Hate Suzie was acclaimed by television critics, who praised the writing and Piper's performance.[12] The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 94% with an average score of 8.1/10, based on 34 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Gazing into the eye of the celebrity storm with frenzied style, I Hate Suzie is a ruthless satire on stardom that is effortlessly carried by Billie Piper's manic performance."[13] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the first season a score of 85 out of 100 based on 11 critics, indicating "Universal acclaim".[14]

Writing for The Telegraph, Chris Bennion gave the show 5 out of 5 stars, stating "I Hate Suzie is a glorious mess of ideas, a potent, fizzing monument to the creativity of its makers."[15] Lucy Mangan of The Guardian praised the collaboration between Prebble and Piper, calling the show a "wild ride that feels like an absolute gift."[16] Kristen Baldwin in her review for Entertainment Weekly gave the series an "A" rating, calling it a "bloody brilliant exploration of modern womanhood" that "tells a wholly unique story about the liberation that comes from total exposure."[17]

Sonia Saraiya of Vanity Fair wrote, "I Hate Suzie is a masterclass in tone... a portrait of vulnerability that bewitches not by prettifying itself, or making itself ugly, but instead with stark, unfiltered honesty."[18] Ed Cumming of The Independent wrote, "Piper has a rare gift for eliciting sympathy... [w]hat emerges is a black-comedy-horror about female friendship, modern fame, and the impossibility of true privacy in a world where everyone has an online video camera in their pockets."[19]

In a more critical review, Allison Keene of Paste deemed the series "messy, ambitious, chic, yet ultimately a little shallow and out of focus."[20] However, she reserved praise for Piper's acting, calling her performance "astonishingly open".[20] Matt Walsh of TV Guide wrote "You might squirm but will never hate the excellent Piper, as Suzie careens from self-pity to self-disgust in a surreal blur of debauched despair."[21] Writing for Decider, Joel Keller found the first episode to be "an effective exercise in seeing a person's life fall apart around them in short order" but was more "intrigued with seeing Piper's interpretation of how Suzie tries to put the pieces back together."[22]

I Hate Suzie appeared on several critics year-end top ten lists: