This week I binged the final season of SHRILL, Aidy Bryant's fantastic Hulu comedy about a 20 something writer for an indy Portland paper who decides to stop taking people's crap about her gender or her weight and claim the life she wants.
It's a show that I've come to love, and yet I don't totally know why it's hooked me as strongly as it has. And I think whenever you have that sense of surprise or mystery about a pop culture something, it's worth stopping to ask what's going on. Maybe it's just a great cast and the comfort you (aka I) have needed in a nightmare time. But often there's maybe something in the writing, too, that we can learn from and use.
So, this week, SHRILL!
I'm starting with the finale, in which our main characters Annie (Bryant) and her longtime roommate and best friend Fran (Lolly Adefope) are each about to step into bigger lives of their own with the partners they've found. And I'm doing so because the episode offers such an unexpected, Let's Take This Whole Show Deeper turn.
Quick summary: In the ep, Fran is looking for places with her partner Em, while Annie is trying to push her new boyfriend Will to do something similar. And it looks to be a kind of happily ever after for the characters, which actually feels very earned given all they've gone through in the series and also given the comic nature of the series.
But finales are often a moment to reflect in a different way on what we've been watching all along. And the way writers Aidy Bryant & Alexandra Rushfield & Lindy West come at that is by centering the episode on the relationship at its core, Fran and Annie. We open on them holding each other, Annie explaining that as she prepares for Fran to move out she needs to savor what they have. It's a tender, sweet moment with just enough of the wacky comedy that the show knows how to bring.
Then we follow both of the characters in their lives. Annie's story seems to be going in its own direction--the paper might be sold to the human equivalent of bots, while she becomes obsessed with learning about Will's ex-wife. But Fran's ends up curling back around to talk about her relationship with Annie, with Em saying the two of them have been keeping their "college vibe" alive too long. They need to grow and change.
That ends up being the question of the episode. "I think it's good that we save a piece of ourselves that they never get to see because it's for us," Annie tells Fran after hearing Em's critique. "We're perfect. And everyone else can eat shit."
In a way you can see where the episode has to be going given this set up, but at the same time this has never been a show about two fucked up women who enable each other to hide from reality. They've been there for each other, and they've also pushed each other.
So this take really is something new and interesting, a deeper look.
And what emerges in the end is a unexpectedly profound contemplation of post-college friendship. "This is the greatest love of all time," Fran says of the two of them as the two sit on a park bench drinking champagne they meant to have on their final night together, having fucked up their relationships.
"We'll fix everything," Fran tells Annie. And Annie agrees. But the look on their faces very much leaves us wondering whether that's possible. And on second thought it clearly isn't, because in order to have the things they want, they'll have to break the thing they have.
A great finale puts everything we've watched in a new perspective, surprises us with a new take on the characters we love. Newhart wakes up in bed with his wife from the old show. Claire Fisher drives to New York while we watch everyone we've come to love die. The Sopranos sit in the diner, trapped in a hell of waiting for the bullets that seem inevitably headed for them.
In its very personal and quirky-world way, SHRILL offers that level of depth in its finale, and then goes one step further, allowing the struggle and relationship between these characters to hold a mirror up to of our own complicated experiences of friendship.
It's not the end you expect,
it's sadder and more scary. But at the same time the whole show has been
about these two great women pushing themselves to get to a place where
they'll take the real risks to have the lives they want. And so it's
absolutely fitting in that brilliantly inevitable and unexpected way that the show would end on the reveal that the last risk they have to take is to step away from each other.
