Shrill Is Ending, But Aidy Bryant Is Excited for What Comes Next

This piece contains spoilers for season three of Shrill.

Last month, I found myself extremely nervous to get on the phone with Aidy Bryant. Bryant and I have spoken before, for a story about Shrill’s second season, and her warmth was palpable enough to instantly set me at ease. But since our initial conversation in January 2020, I’ve made the choice to actually inhabit my fat body—without dieting or exercising to lose weight—for the first time in my life, and talking to Bryant in that context feels akin to a Little League player meeting Babe Ruth. I wish this weren’t the case—I wish two fat women talking was the media norm, rather than the exception—but sadly, we just don’t seem to be there.

Despite my obvious nerves, or maybe because of them, Bryant is quick to dispel any misconception of herself as an enlightened body warrior who’s at peace with her corporeal form 24/7. She notes that in the course of her work, she’s met people of all body types who experience physical anxiety and unease: “You’d be surprised how many people feel the exact same way, even though they look completely different.”

There’s so much to note about Bryant—she’s a former improv star turned Saturday Night Live sensation, a fashionista who favors Batsheva and Simone Rocha, a proud Arizonan at heart—that talking to her about weight automatically feels a bit reductive, but it’s a subject she’s decidedly unafraid to approach. Still, she wishes people asked her as much about her work as they did about her body: “It’s part of my life, and I’m happy to talk about it, but it’s a tonnage thing to me. Over the course of an interview, if 99% of the questions are about being fat in Hollywood and how I deal with it and fatphobia and those kinds of things, I feel like I’ve spent 1% talking about the actual show that I made, produced, write, and star in.”

That actual show—which has its third and final season out on Hulu today—is back in fine form. And while much of Bryant’s character’s arc does revolve around her weight, it’s a lot more interesting than the cookie-cutter tropes we’re used to being served about fat women. Yes, Bryant’s Annie deals with blatant fatphobia at a doctor’s appointment, and yes, she initially bristles at being set up on a blind date with another fat person out of concern for how the world might see them together. But these weight-related misadventures don’t make up the totality of who Annie is—even if, at times, it’s clear that she hasn’t totally broken old habits of self-deprecation and insecurity.

One of the greatest joys of the three-season trajectory of this show, is the way it allows for Annie’s world to open up. Annie, an up-and-coming journalist at an alt weekly, swings big and screws up and tries again, and she does so more than ever this time around, having (mostly) shed her loser ex-boyfriend, Ryan (Luka Jones), redoubled her commitment to her BFF-ship with roommate Fran (Lolly Adefope, who shines brighter than ever), and geared herself up to fight for the articles she actually cares about. Her demeaning boss (John Cameron Mitchell) might refer to Annie’s beat as “Yas, fat queen!” articles, but by the final episode, it’s clear that Annie is on the path to finding her authentic voice in work and in life—even if, sadly, we don’t get to see her use it in ensuing seasons.

When I ask Bryant how she feels about ending the show with its third season, she’s introspective. “It’s a weird feeling, but I’m really proud of what we made. I think it lands in a place that feels really natural to me...like, there is no finish line, but working on yourself and growing and finding your own self-worth is an ongoing battle that we’re all in. I think it ends on sort of a realistic note in that way, rather than being like, ‘This is my fight song.’” It’s true that to end with a bang would be antithetical to Shrill’s entire mode, which has always front-loaded the whimpers of everyday life—the professional setbacks, the romantic disappointments, the texts sent and quickly regretted—with near-surgical precision.

Bryant is excited about releasing this final installment—“I really think this season is our best yet,” she says—particularly after the uncertainty of the past year, during which the Shrill writers’ room worked primarily on Zoom. When I tell Bryant I often had to watch Annie’s scenes through my fingers because I felt so much secondhand anxiety, she laughs and says: “We came up with this idea of Annie as a well-intentioned person who wants things to be good, but...they aren’t always. We really wanted it to feel real.” (Episode four, in which Annie writes a too-glowing profile of what essentially amounts to a fundamentalist compound, stands out as a particularly cringey watch. But it also feels refreshing to watch a show that trusts its protagonist to be wrong.)

Despite the “bittersweet” feeling of seeing Shrill end, there’s plenty on the horizon for Bryant. “If you include development, I’ve been working on this show for about four years now, and then with SNL at the same time.... It didn’t leave me much space for anything else,” she says. “In that time, I’ve had new ideas and little things that I’ve worked on, but nothing where I had the time to actually invest in it. Now I finally have that time and I’m working on new stuff, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is exciting.’ There are shreds of what I’ve learned on Shrill, but there’s stuff that I’m ready to explore in a new way. I feel only excited.” By the end of Shrill, Annie has so many new stories to tell, both about who she is and how she sees the world; the same is clearly true of Bryant, and based on her track record, the odds are good that any story she chooses to tell will be worth hearing.