If there is a previous thread I missed while searching, please link it and we can post there instead and let this thread die. Meanwhile…
“Shrill” is pretty cool. It stars Aidy Bryant as Ann Easton, fat female journalist, and is loosely based on a book by Lindy West - “Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman.”
I love it, for several reasons. Practically speaking, each episode is only 20-ish minutes long, which I appreciate when I want a brief distraction but don’t want to commit to 57 minutes of drama.
More importantly, it’s a delight, both for its comic moments and for its - occasionally quite moving - drama. Sure, it has some predictable, cheesy moments, but overall it is funny, smart, and exactly as in-your-face as it should be. I adore the way it forces people, me included (thanks to the luck of the genetic draw, I’m not overweight), to look at their prejudices against fat women.
The clueless boyfriend is so much fun to watch, as is Ann’s boss.
I’m very happy this show is out there. I’m one episode into season 2, will finish it soon, and can’t wait to watch more.
Yeah! I had read about it before it came out and anxiously awaited the premiere, and wasn’t disappointed. I love Aidy Bryant, I think she’s very funny and a very good actress. The show really hits a lot of points, not just “living as fat.” It touches on the lives of the gay and non-white characters, and also deals with the issue of aging parents a bit.
Season 2 is good, the arc with the boyfriend is good. He becomes increasingly hard to bear but I’m happy with the resolution.
I do wrestle with the boyfriend character a bit, as I don’t think he’s good enough for her, and he’s kinda gross. Like she’s settling for him because that’s the best she can do. But I have to remind myself that I also get frustrated when the fat female character is “saved” by some hot guy who loves her just the way she is. I don’t find that too realistic either. When it comes down to it, her relationship in this show is very much like the ones I’ve had myself. Only this guy, while clueless, is actually in love with her, so that’s good to see. And ultimately it’s good and realistic to see two weird, awkward people together.
Love this show. I watched all of season 1 over a weekend after hearing Aidy talk about it on NPR. Gosh, I love that woman. Based on what she said, there is a lot of herself in the character and her real life persona is so sweet and down to Earth.
Season to is starting out a little problematic for me for reasons **Zipper JJ **mentioned:
I agree with some of this but based on the first ep of Season 2, I’m not sure how much more of him I can take. I think it reminds me too much of relationships I’ve been in where the other person has seemingly no aptitude at pulling off even the simplest of tasks for the relationship, i.e. in S2E1 the two of them go camping at the last minute in order to escape her online troll. It’s a complete cluster and not far from the kind of things that have happened to me and I just can’t laugh at it. But that’s my fault, not the show’s.
A little fact I recently learned about Aidy Bryant. Her husband is Connor O’Malley, who I know through Joe Pera Talks With you but he also shows up in this season of Shrill, as one of the annoying new friends that her boyfriend makes (not sure if he’s shown up yet in the episodes y’all have seen.) O’Malley plays pretty much the same Annoying Explosive Guy in both series, and in everything I’ve seen him in (he does a lot of short comedy sketches with people you can find on YouTube). I suspect that is his at least somewhat his real personality. He’s not unlike Ryan, at least in the characters he plays.
Obviously I don’t know O’Malley or Bryant personally, so I have no clue as to how they are offscreen, but I find it kind of sweet to think that she’s married to someone who I perceive to be not too unlike the idiot boyfriend on the show.