THAT was a love story and this is a love letter.

It's gently ludicrous to talk about a void being left behind at the end of a television series. Any television series, but particularly one with just 12 episodes and those 12 episodes barely pushing 25 minutes each.

Still, since Monday night's final segment of Fleabag, I've allowed myself a wallow, knowing Fleabag herself would fully approve of a self-indulgent dwell. (Would she?)

Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's glorious comic tragedy, is but four days in the ground so I reckon I have just enough time to praise it before the backlash begins and Twitter starts seething with all the people who didn't really like it, don't see what the fuss is about, thought it was overrated.

Of course, there was an immediate backlash from people with critical concerns, rather than those who reject a craze in order to demonstrate they're too cool to care (normally me) or from some sense of tall poppy syndrome. From some, there is a sense of exasperation at a television programme turning around a middle-class, privately educated, central character (Don't tell anyone Waller-Bridge's maternal grandfather was a baronet). Yes, there is a problem with diversity in Fleabag, and that's something to have a frank conversation about.

Fleabag, though, is not unquestioningly affectionate about the middle-classes. It brilliantly portrays and skewers the relationship damage done by stifling politeness. Much of the show's dramatic comedy turns on the repression of feelings and opinions until such point as they explode from the pressure of containment.

She's middle class, yes, yet still managed to hold a mirror up to the universality of love and pain and darkness. Doesn't it seem it's routinely funny women who find themselves in the crosshairs of this type of ire?

In 2013 when Fleabag was a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Guardian gave it three stars out of five. Reviews were far from glowing. The Telegraph said there would be no interest beyond "the hipster enclaves of east London." Look what happens when talent is nurtured and supported.

What happens is you end up with a lot to dissect. Waller-Bridge not only broke the fourth wall but she invented a fifth wall, in an astounding twist. Could the Priest see that she was talking to an unseen entity because he believes in his own unseen entity? Was the Priest as lost as Fleabag or merely exploitative? Was the statue a totem of motherhood that she tried to pass on to every mother figure in her life before reaching a stage of maturity that meant she could keep it for herself?

Was Fleabag a misunderstood anti-hero or just an awful person? Why wasn't this type of critical analysis as interesting when I needed to do it for my degree?

In our new television binge culture the quaint weekly wait for an episode to air was agonisingly delightful. I haven't owned a television in eight years and haven't missed it. Very, very rarely does a television programme engage enough to keep me interested; my Netflix account is a string of abandoned shows.

So why did Fleabag, with her faces like emoticons drawn by Picasso, grip this way? I haven't felt so wooed by a television show since The X-Files. Dana Scully was a role model but an impossible role model. I was useless at science; couldn't have deduced my toes were at the end of my foot, and yet I aspired to be a doctor-cum-FBI agent. I did, in fact, look at the application forms for joining the FBI. I fell down on not being American. The fitness tests might also have been a challenge.

Fleabag, though, was not aspirational, she was relatable. “I have a horrible feeling that I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman.” (Her dad: "You get all that from your mother.")

There's a terror in the pressure of performative niceness that's expected of women. That social pressure we face to be nice and kind and tolerant and patient - particularly of men, in our spaces, taking up our time. Explaining to us. (I already know.)

But what if, really, underneath, we're not very nice. What then? Fleabag's progression is one of personal growth and acceptance. The ending was perfect because it was symbolic of her lifting out of grief and need and finding self-acceptance, rather than an easier but much less satisfying 'girl gets boy' ending. She found 'the one': herself.

She was grotty and she was unhappy and she faced multiple traumas but she showed young women have a parallel with Kristin Scott Thomas's sparkling line: “Oh, I love courgettes. You can treat them appallingly and they still grow.”

It was a love story but a love story of women: Fleabag developed her relationship with her sister ("The only person I'd run through an airport for is you."), she mourned deeply for the one person who had truly seen her, her best friend; Godmother had been in love with Fleabag's mother; even the loved guinea pig was a girl.

I understand now why people love television; this total immersion, wanting to talk about it, analyse it, share it with other people. I'm not going to buy a television or anything (I'm not mad) but without Fleabag's weekly treat, I'm bereft.

Oh well. It'll pass.