Aidy Bryant Opens Up About the Abrupt Ending on ‘Shrill’

The Hulu show didn't get the full final season it deserved, but Bryant still loves it.

Aidy Bryant Opens Up About the Abrupt Ending on ‘Shrill’

There's a moment in an early episode of Shrill season three that will resonate with fat viewers. It's when Annie (Aidy Bryant), newly single and feeling better than ever, is set up on a blind date by her coworker Amadi (Ian Owens). She enters the restaurant confidently—and looking gorgeous—but is instantly thrown off when she sees her date, Will, is also fat. 

She's hit with a million emotions at once—anger, confusion, embarrassment—and they're all palpable on her face. Did Amadi set them up only because of their bodies? She can't shake this thought and ends up torpedoing the date, looking really bad in the process. 

It's a humanizing moment for Annie. She's spent the last two and half years working on herself, on her own body acceptance, and rebuking culture's notion that fat is bad. But when faced with the idea of dating another fat person, she recoils. Maybe, perhaps, she's not as enlightened as she thought. “To me, it was the most emotional thing to perform,” Bryant tells me on Zoom in late April. 

Spoiler alert: Annie and Will do end up dating by episode six but only after she shows him her cards. She comes clean about why their first encounter went so horribly: her own self-loathing, as Bryant astutely puts it. 

“She meets [Will] in the second episode. That could be the season, but she stops herself from trying,” she says. “I think it's because there's something embarrassing about it or something self-loathing about it. When they do eventually connect, it's because she's really been vulnerable with him and faces the fact there was self-hatred that she put on to him.” 

In a way, this moment is a thesis for Shrill's third and final season: Progress, especially toward one's self-image, isn't linear. Annie's obviously grown leaps and bounds since season one, when she was willfully sneaking out of her ex-boyfriend Ryan's house after secret hookups. She's no longer taking shit from coworkers and strangers and isn't afraid of the word fat. But that doesn't mean she's immune to the very real and damaging beauty standards that still permeate our daily lives. 

“I think there's a practicality about our show and a realism that isn't all, ‘You go girl! Love yourself!’ That oversimplification,” Bryant says. “There's a way our show has gotten under some of that nitty-gritty of [body acceptance]. Let's get under the hood and talk about the pressure and the pain and the shame.” 

That last sentence is what Shrill's third season does particularly well. Season one was, in many respects, an introduction to the concept of fat acceptance—of saying the word fat without thinking it's negative and showing a fat protagonist not concerned with losing weight. In season two weight was hardly discussed, which was groundbreaking in itself. Now, in season three, we've come full circle, and the question is: What does life look like for a fat person finished with diet culture but still living in a world dominated by it? 

“It's almost like the villain of the show is Annie's past,” Lindy West, who wrote Shrill's source material, tells me. “It just keeps trying to drag her back, and she's fighting hard to move forward, which is all we can do. No matter how much internal progress you make, you still live in the world.”

Adds Shrill executive producer Ali Rushfield, “Annie thinks her issues with her body are in her past, that she's come to terms and likes who she is. But when faced with dating, she [realizes] she still has a lot of issues about it—because the way people might look at her or the way she might assume they look at her.”

This manifests itself in several different ways throughout the season. In one episode Annie is told by a doctor she should consider gastric bypass surgery even though this doctor has no record of her health. In another, a drunk idiot fat-shames her and her friends on a night out. And then, of course, there's the Will of it all. 

“You think about Annie at the beginning of the season, and she's finally out there dating and she's finally rid of Ryan. Those are big wins,” Bryant says. “But then once she gets out there, you see her still not totally being up for it. She's confident, but is she really? Or is she pretending? The work is never over. Every time you think you're there, there's a little bit further to go.”

West echoes Bryant's sentiment. “We all do this,” she says. “We move forward, but all of your old wounds are still there. It would be unrealistic for Annie to cross some threshold and be a fully actualized person who doesn't still have those triggers. There's something comforting in watching a character move forward but still struggle with the past.”

The way Annie struggles with her past isn't always pretty. Like I said, she's straight-up rude to Will on their first date—dismissive, distant, and detached. But West says seeing a fat person get to exist in that space is refreshing, and I agree. “Fat people, since we're supposed to apologize for having these bodies, you try to make up for it by being really funny and nice and helpful and perfect in every other way,” she tells me. “Letting Annie be messy, it's liberating, even though she's such an asshole [in that scene]. It's just true. It feels true. She gets to be a fully developed person who isn't always this evolved, perfectly behaved being." 

The show ends on that note too. Again, spoiler alert: Annie and her roommate, Fran (Lolly Adefope), completely implode their respective relationships. But because Hulu cut the cord on Shrill before they could film more episodes, we don't see how things are resolved. Is that frustrating? Sure, but it's also poetic—and authentic. Just like our self-image relationship ebbs, flows, and is ever changing, so do our lives. Hardly ever are issues tied up in pristine, polished packages. “I really loved that that's where the show ends because I think I would feel really guilty if we sold some sort of imaginary dream that might not be reality for most people,” Bryant says.

It turns out, reality for most of us is exactly what we see in this final scene: Two best friends sitting on a bench, splitting a bottle of Champagne, worried about what their next steps are. Whether that's picking up the pieces of a relationship or accepting your body, there's no comprehensive guide to life—no manual, no guarantee that if you do X, Y happens. All you can do is forge ahead, hopefully knowing a little more than you did before. As Shrill ends and fat people have to continue walking through life without this show, that message is paramount. 

As Rushfield says, “Part of progression is falling back to your old habits. That is moving forward even though it feels like moving backward. In Annie's case, she's dealing with some of her old issues, but maybe the way she reacts to the aftermath is different. That's her progression.”

Shrill season three is now streaming on Hulu.

Christopher Rosa is the entertainment editor at Glamour. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Christopher Rosa