Crashing is a British TV series written by (and starring) Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was released in early 2016, right before her one-woman show Fleabag was also released for TV later in 2016. This post contains spoilers.

Crashing is a dark comedy that began as two separate plays, each about a pair of characters. Waller-Bridged combined them into one screenplay for the TV series in which a dozen twenty-something characters navigate messy friendships and relationships while living together in an abandoned hospital in London.

“The stimulus for them was to find the moment something exciting could have happened between two people but doesn’t because they bottle it at the last minute.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge from an interview in The Standard magazine

While the show is mostly centered on two main pairs (Anthony and Lulu, Fred and Sam), all the characters form a tangled network as they interact with each other. Anthony and Lulu are childhood besties doing a horrible job of avoiding their unrequited love while Anthony’s fiancee Kate anxiously puts up with the way they mess their way through denial. Sam develops an intense, ostensibly platonic fondness for Fred while repressing confusion about his own sexuality. In the first episode, Kate’s confesses her jealousy of Lulu to co-worker Jessica who does nothing to assuage her. Instead she states, “Everyone f*cks everyone, eventually.” Waller-Bridge then strings us through six episodes of will-they/won’t-they moments.

Methodology

I wanted to visualize how all the relationships changed throughout the series according to how they all felt about each other. To illustrate this I re-watched each episode and recorded the intensity of each character’s feelings towards each other in a matrix on a five point scale. [1] for friendly, platonic, or indifference, [2] for flirty or interested, [3] for a casual hookup or heated disagreement, and [4] for seriously intense love, infatuation, jealousy, or anger. I assigned no value to characters who didn’t interact at all.

I then turned these matrices into a networked dataset to be visualized in Gephi. Each of the characters became a node and their feelings became edges, some were directed (unrequited) and some were undirected (mutual). This was a manual process of transcribing the matrix data into a nodes CSV and six edges CSVs, one for each episode. To assign directionality I watched each episode yet again since it wasn’t part of my original data collection process. Each edge was weighted according to the emotion intensity scale.

In Gephi I created a workbook for each episode and ran the Fruchterman Reingold layout algorithm with an area of 10,000 and default gravity/speed settings. To preserve each character’s position on the screen I manually dragged the nodes to their desired locations and ran the layout algorithm once more to even out the spacing. I used Gephi to generate a colour palette with unique colours for each of the thirteen characters. For the final renders, I chose straight edges to emphasize the nature of the more intense feeling (edge) that connected each character. Each edge colour is a blend between the two nodes (characters) and edge thickness was used to encode emotion intensity.

Reflections

Since this is a very small network, it was easy to create a pretty refined visualization. I deliberately chose not to use curved edges despite the simplicity of the network because I wanted to call out the more intense edge, especially directed ones, for each pair. Showing every single edge would provide a full picture of the data but the resulting images would be much less succinct. The next time I visualize this data I’d like to try an arc diagram with each character on a horizontal line and curved edges. This might be a good way to display the temporal aspect of the data. I’d also like to re-do the data collection with a wider scale for feelings to differentiate between positive and negative emotions, since the scale I used for this project lumps them both into one and only measures intensity. Maybe the negative emotions could be below the horizontal line and the positive ones above.

The Graphs

In episode 1 Lulu arrives in London to surprise Anthony and walks into Sam’s birthday party at the condemned hospital where they all live. Kate immediately feels jealous of Lulu and rightfully so, as Anthony and Lulu accidentally share a kiss while catching up, but she ends up inviting Lulu to stay at the hospital with them. Sam flirts with nearly everyone and is annoyed that an Unbelievably Hot Guy was invited to the party whom he sees as a threat to his chances of scoring that evening. Colin, Kate and Jessica’s co-worker, has recently gone through an upsetting divorce but is still living with his ex-wife Cara and her new boyfriend. They invite him to come live at the hospital instead, and Melody takes a liking to him. Same develops confusing feelings towards Fred.

In episode 2, Kate’s jealousy towards Lulu intensifies, Melody becomes obsessed with Colin as her artistic muse, Colin is still bitterly upset about his divorce, and Anthony and Lulu continue to be awkward towards each other. Fred admits he’s interested in Sam who rebuffs him but continues to lead him on. Lulu hooks up with Kate and Jessica’s colleague, Johnny, the office flirt.

In episode 3 we’re introduced to Will, Fred’s new boyfriend. Sam becomes pretty jealous of Will as his friendship with Fred gets more serious. Lulu gets too drunk at dinner and everyone is exasperated with her, especially when she reveals some heated secrets about Anthony and Kate’s private life to everyone via her ukulele sing-a-long.

In episode 4 some of the relationships solidify and become more intense. Colin is confused about Melody but accommodates her. After Anthony helps Lulu secure some money from her creepy Aunt Gladys they almost end up sharing their true feelings about each other. Sam becomes aggressively jealous of Will and they have a confrontation. Lulu and Sam hook up despite Anthony declaring Lulu as off-limits to Sam. Kate opens up to Melody, then accidentally admits to Anthony that she’s not really in love with him as she falls asleep for the night.

In episode 5 the housemates wake up to an eviction notice and Kate has conveniently forgotten her late-night confession. Fred and Sam agree to find a new place together, but Will surprises Fred by asking him to move in with him. Anthony gets angry in front of everyone when he finds out Sam and Lulu hooked up. This causes Kate to panic and she declares to Anthony that they should find a real house to move into together without Lulu. Melody and Colin find their groove as painter and muse, and he commits to removing himself from his ex-wife’s living situation. Sam and Will have another confrontation which ends with Fred breaking up with Will.

In the final episode, an upset Kate disappears with Fred to drink their sorrows away. Colin falls out of Melody’s window and he finally lets go of his ex-wife Cara, waking up to defend Melody when Cara insults her at the hospital. Fred collapses into a diabetic coma and Sam finally admits that he has feelings for Fred. Anthony and Lulu go looking for Kate and eventually see Jessica kissing her and Anthony is convinced of his hunch that Kate is a lesbian. Lulu takes a another peek and realizes that this isn’t true but conceals it from Anthony. They go home after mutually deciding to hook up, finally laying out their actual feelings for each other.

It turns out Jessica was right after all.