"Shrill," Starring Aidy Bryant, Is a Revolution for Fat Representation

The opening episode of the new Hulu series Shrill, based on the book of the same name by writer Lindy West, starts out, well, heavy. The main character, Annie, played by Aidy Bryant, realizes she is pregnant because the morning-after pill she's been taking isn't guaranteed to work on people over over a certain weight. The pharmacist fails to tell Annie this information, and she ends up with an unplanned pregnancy and decides to have an abortion. Despite abortion being a common medical procedure, it is still controversial to show it on television — but the show depicts it with nuance and sensitivity and sets the tone for the series ahead. Shrill takes on serious, sometimes gutting topics, and through humor shows them for what they are: real-life issues that everyday women grapple with. The irony of the premiere is that the abortion isn’t the most emotional facet of the episode; instead, it focuses on how Annie's normal everyday life is made more complex by her fatness.

I can probably count on one hand the times I’ve seen a fat woman onscreen. The number goes down when I think about a fat-woman character who isn’t focused on losing weight, who isn’t a villain in some way, who doesn’t hate herself. In fact, it is so taken for granted that fat women should be hated, criticized, or trying to lose weight that it's downright revelatory to see one onscreen who interacts with a world that hates fatness and refuses to submit to that with self-hatred. When I started watching Shrill, I was expecting it to be funny and inspiring, but instead found myself sobbing through most of it.

On its face, perhaps, Shrill doesn’t stick out from the handful of other quiet, quirky comedies about millennial life. By all measures, Annie is a “normal” woman—sexually active, ambitious, cool friends, cute clothes, with overbearing but mostly nice parents and boyfriends that are largely disappointing. What sets Shrill apart from the trend of quieter, aesthetically pleasing dramedies is that Annie is not the vision of what we are used to.

In that first episode, she leaves work for a midday (unprotected) tryst with her non-boyfriend Ryan (Luka Jones), after which he asks her to leave through the back door. Maybe it's not explicit that this is happening because she is fat — he clearly loves her body and is just bad at everything else — but it’s hard not to assume that’s the reason for the secrecy. That is a universal fat-girl fear: He doesn’t want his friends to see him with a fat woman. Annie is not happy about the back-door exit, but being a living, breathing human who also wants to have sex, she puts up with it. He’s cute, and the sex is good. Who among us…

Later in the series, an episode titled “Pool Party” contains two of the most groundbreaking scenes in the show. At one point, Annie is trying to walk across the street, and she is indecisive, doing a little dance with a car to determine should go first. She stands back, and while she does that, a beautiful woman (Hunter McGrady) dressed in red, who is also plus size, boldly crosses the street. This mystery woman knows who she is, she knows it’s her turn to walk, and her confidence catches Annie’s attention. Annie follows her into a flower shop. The two don’t interact, but it’s a powerful moment, one where the character sees a version of herself that has yet to be realized: a fat woman who is confident and unapologetic about taking up space. Annie decides to buy herself flowers as well.

She then ends up at a “Fat Babe Pool Party,” and it is here that Annie is confronted with bodies of all sizes with no f*cks to give lounging in swimwear. The party takes every conventional understanding we have of the fat condition and its relationship to the hostile environment of the pool (or the beach or any other place you have to wear a swimsuit). Sipping on a margarita with Ariana Grande’s "One Last Time" playing in the background, Annie loses herself and transforms in front of us. She doesn’t want to dance at first, but when she sees all the other bodies dancing, scantily clad, she loses herself in the moment.

The scene is a profound display of body positivity and the power of having role models and diverse representation. It also explores (as does the series) the interior life of a fat woman, not through the guise of self-hatred or weight loss, but exploration and discovery. It’s a fat woman’s coming of age.

The pool party is just one scene in a series that is sprinkled with the realities of living in a fat body. People calling you fat, funny, dehumanizing you every step of the way. A loving mom who overextends by encouraging you to eat better "for your health" and a series of other scenes that illustrate the day-to-day ways fat people are humiliated and discriminated against. But our protagonist is not weighed down by this or destroyed by it. What defines her is that she is an aspiring writer who has a strong point of view and really great friends.

I became emotional watching Shrill in a way I wasn’t expecting because we’ve become so accustomed to fat people being the butt of jokes, the sidekick, or the object of derision. We have been deprived of the representations that engage the realities of our lives. I realized that it was one of the first times I had seen a reflection of what it is like to be an actual fat woman. We dress cute. We need access to reproductive health care. And while the show is about how fatness impacts her life and the prevalence of fat discrimination, it doesn’t solely focus on that. Like most forms of discrimination, it’s something she bears the brunt of, something she realizes impacts her life like any form of discrimination, but doesn’t fully define her.

Perhaps that alone doesn’t make this show a revolution for fat women. But watching it as one certainly felt like it.

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