If you want to understand the new feminist show “Shrill,” based on the memoir of #ShoutYourAbortion co-founder Lindy West, don’t bother watching it. Just listen to the final scene.
(Of course, this is a spoiler, but let’s be real: It’s not as if you would expect the show to end differently.)
The protagonist, Annie, marches up to the home of a man who’s been trolling her online. She’s written a couple of feminist pieces for the alternative publication where she works, one called “Hello, I’m Fat,” and the troll has been making fun of her weight.
After tracking down his IP address, she confronts him at his doorstep. The well-coiffed white guy apologizes, and then he delivers a monologue like that bully in a high school movie who realizes it was really just his relationship with his dad that made him so mean all along.
When Annie asks what she ever did to him, the troll responds, “Pissed me off. The stuff that you write, the feminist shit, I don’t agree with a lot of it. So I thought I’d push you a little. Or, a lot. I was big when I was a kid. You’re … fat, but your writing is so confident. And I hate myself. You don’t. You’re out there yelling, ‘This is me …’ It made me mad. I’m sorry.”
Yep, those are words that a screenwriter wrote and many other people allowed to appear in a TV show that the New York Times called “lovely.”
The troll then invites Annie in for a drink, she refuses, and he cusses her out just like old times. She throws a pot at his car. Curtain.
Like its final scene, the show is clipped, hackneyed, and desperate to be empowering. Its simple message is good, and much-needed: Women who don’t fit into factory-size clothing should be unashamed. In episode four, the only one worth watching, a bunch of curvy women gather for a pool party filled with pastels and margaritas and self-love. I am here for it.
But where the rest of the show tries so hard to be meaningful, it descends to caricature, identity politics, and untruth.
Take the abortion storyline, for example. West’s abortion enthusiasm is evident in the fact that Annie has a quick abortion in the pilot episode, nothing sentimental or groundbreaking, as the Washington Post put it. In fact, the ending of her pregnancy marks the beginning of her journey toward empowerment.
“I got myself into this huge fucking mess, but I made a decision, only for me, for myself, and I got myself out of it,” Annie says. “I feel very fucking powerful right now.”
Ask the thousands of women who regret their abortions if they feel powerful, and Annie’s hopes of enlightenment start to feel hollow.
Even the Internet troll storyline could’ve played better. I thought the troll might turn out to be the skinny gym trainer Annie met earlier in the season, which would’ve been a great way to tie in the show’s feminist message, the importance of women supporting women.
But no, of course, it was a young, affluent white guy.
Except for Annie’s dad, who has cancer, all of the white guys in this show suck. Her boyfriend Ryan, whose mom washes his clothes, sucks. Her boss Gabe sucks. Gabe is gay, but it’s OK that he sucks because he’s also fatphobic.
“You’re a gay man,” Annie says in the final episode. “How can you not be sympathetic towards this?”
“I was born gay,” Gabe says. “I had no choice. You do!”
West claims that Gabe is not based on Dan Savage, her former editor. But when they were both at the Stranger, an alternative Seattle newspaper, West called out Savage for his descriptions of fat people. The two once exchanged words through a pair of articles, almost exactly those in “Shrill”: “Hello, I Am Fat,” and “Hello, I’m Not the Enemy.”
West says she and Savage have resolved their quarrel, but no such resolution comes for Annie in “Shrill.” At the end of the season, she’s louder and more assertive than before. But she’s hurt her friends and family, and we’re left with little evidence that she’s changed.
Like the memoir it’s based on, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, “Shrill” isn’t powerful. It’s just full of noise.
