Shrill review – heart outshines humor in small screen Lindy West adaptation
Early on in Hulu’s Shrill, aspiring journalist Annie, played by Saturday Night Live star Aidy Bryant, is confronted by Ryan, the stoner guy she’s sleeping with who has already proved to be, at best, scant boyfriend material. “Just tell me what you want!” he pleads, as she wavers.
That question forms the backbone of Shrill, a coming-into-one’s-own series based on the memoir by feminist writer Lindy West. The question isn’t simple for any twentysomething altweekly journalist in Portland, but Annie and West’s answer is further complicated by their bodies – full-figured and proud, in a world that consistently condemns them for living their life when, as a thin trainer tells Annie at a coffee shop: “There is a small person inside of you dying to get out.”
Those sort of well-intentioned indignities pepper Annie’s days, but Shrill, to its credit, uses them sparingly and with intention; fat-shaming and condescension over making “healthier choices” are elements of the set, rather than its parameters. Instead, Bryant’s Annie – along with her best friend and roommate, professional line-zinger Fran (an extremely on-point Lolly Adefope) – navigate the usual thicket of mid-20s anxieties and often dueling impulses. Over the course of six halfhour episodes, Annie both skirts and confronts that underlying question – what does she want? – as she tries to impress and subvert her quippy, relevancy-obsessed editor (John Cameron Mitchell, precise in his delivery of “I love you, you’re a vital and tiny cog”) and tolerates the non-committals of her DIY podcaster love interest, Ryan (Luka Jonas). But that seeking stops, pointedly, at her weight. Shrill’s writers, which include West, explore the insecurities and common indecencies (lack of clothing options, pharmacists who don’t warn that morning after pills aren’t as effective for women over 175lbs) that come with her size, but never strive to change it.
Instead, Shrill focuses on Annie’s life as it is, flitting from flirtations to self-doubt to demands that Annie deserves better. Bryant, in particular, is fantastic as Annie, taking in old family photos or a late-night snack with such understated warmth and frankness that it’s startling to remember how infrequently TV portrays the mundanity of female life. There’s a lot to admire about Shrill, perhaps most radically in its total and refreshing lack of judgement for Annie, whether she’s couching her mental gymnastics for Ryan with multiple exclamation points, or dancing freely to Ariana Grande, or blissfully digging into post-sex spaghetti alone in the kitchen, or lying back on a table as a clinician calmly guides her through an uneventful abortion. Those moments – a woman still holding on to parts of an insecure girl, navigating an uncertain 20s of bad bosses and frustrating parents, whose world is inscribed but not defined by the fact that she’s plus-sized – cast Shrill a level apart from most else on TV.
That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect series – the early episodes can often feel more like sketches than supposedly adapted memoir, and one-joke characters (such as a flighty receptionist) wear thin as the show’s heart grows. Even as Shrill hits its stride by the end of the third episode, it never quite reaches the hilarity levels of concurrent comedies such as PEN15 or Big Mouth, which mine the absurd and meta for laughs. But those quibbles feel beside the point, and increasingly less noticeable the more you invest in Annie’s journey, which is more complicated, rollicky and emotional – that is to say, more human – than a straightforward sitcom.
Ultimately, even if the show prompts more respect than laughs, there’s still the revelatory enjoyment of watching a character like Annie have the space to fight and make up with her parents, to revel in an outfit, to have pleasurable yet unremarkable sex, to be at once stubbornly self-absorbed and empathetic to people she interviews. In other words, to ride the vagaries of dayto-day life, without it hinging on comments about her size.
“This is not a show about someone struggling to lose weight,” West told the New York Times of the adaptation. “It’s about her shrugging off those expectations.” On that count, Shrill delivers, translating West’s real humor, hurt and heart to screen. Whether than trans