“Shrill” is as shrill as can be — and that’s comforting
Positioned high over the La Brea Avenue stoplight, a billboard advertising Hulu’s dramedy Shrill, featuring the SNL’s endlessly lovable Aidy Bryant, stops traffic cold.
In her magenta bathing suit, knocking knees together, Bryant is a sick-thoughted modern take on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
But if her character, Annie, is Shrill’s Venus and goddess of love and beauty, then who is the show’s Adonis, her doomed mortal lover?
It turns out he is Ryan.
And
Ryan sucks.
Immature, inconsiderate and incompetent, Ryan is the kind of guy who sends our heroine one-word texts reading “Fuck?” and expects her to leave through the back door when they’re finished so as to not annoy his roommates.
He’s a bona fide schlub, the definition of the emotionally stunted bare minimum with no discernible ambitions, and yet Annie keeps going back as he dangles commitment over her head. ...