Sweetpea - Season 1 Jun 2026

At the heart of Sweetpea is Rhiannon Lewis, played with astonishing versatility by Ella Purnell ( Fallout , Yellowjackets ). When we first meet Rhiannon, she is the dictionary definition of a doormat. She works a dead-end administrative job at a local newspaper, The Carmarthen Gazette, where her boss bullies her, and her actual work involves little more than writing the "what's on" guide and sorting the death notices.

: The show explores how a lifetime of being marginalized can manifest as extreme, violent rebellion.

The genius of Sweetpea - Season 1 lies in its relatability. Rhiannon Lewis (played with terrifying precision by Ella Purnell) is the kind of woman the world walks past. She is a junior reporter for a local rag in a drab British town. Her father is dying. Her boss steals her ideas. Her boyfriend (if you can call him that) treats her like a sex dispenser. She is, by every metric, "sweet."

A series of personal tragedies—including the death of her father and her dog—and professional slights push her to a breaking point. When her former school bully, Julia Blenkingsopp Sweetpea - Season 1

is not a revenge fantasy; it is a supply and demand fantasy. Rhiannon doesn't kill because she is crazy. She kills because it is the only time the world stops ignoring her.

While Rhiannon is the sun around which the show orbits, the solar system of characters in Sweetpea - Season 1 provides the necessary friction to drive the plot.

Just don't make her put your name in her book. At the heart of Sweetpea is Rhiannon Lewis,

Ella Purnell’s Rhiannon is a new icon for the disenfranchised. She represents the quiet, unspoken fantasy of every over-looked assistant, every dismissed woman, every "sweet" person who has ever wanted to scream.

In an era saturated with prestige television antiheroes, from Walter White’s crystalline empire to Dexter Morgan’s moral code, the archetype has become almost predictable: a brilliant, usually male, figure uses violence to resolve the gnawing dissonance between their perceived potential and their societal station. Starz’s Sweetpea , based on the novels by C.J. Skuse, takes this familiar blueprint and injects it with a venomous, feminine, and deeply contemporary dose of reality. Season 1 of Sweetpea is not merely a story of a woman who becomes a serial killer; it is a meticulously crafted, darkly comic, and ultimately tragic exploration of invisible labor, suppressed rage, and the violent reclamation of a self that society has already deemed worthless.

Rhiannon Lewis is an "invisible" wallflower living in the English town of Carnsham, working as a receptionist at the Carnsham Gazette : The show explores how a lifetime of

Watch her during a mundane office meeting. Her smile is held two seconds too long. Her eyes glaze over while a co-worker drones on about SEO metrics. Then, when she gets home and opens her closet to view her "trophies," her face floods with genuine, childlike joy. Purnell makes you root for a serial killer. More disturbingly, she makes you understand one.

Have you watched Sweetpea - Season 1? Who is your favorite character: the pragmatic AJ or the terrifying Rhiannon? Let us know in the comments.