Hot Vax Summer is upon us! And if you ask me, one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is actually just staying the fuck home a little longer to stream one more TV show.
For many, the rush to get back out there and do all the stuff we used to love in the Before Times is sparking a conflicting mixture of excitement and anxiety — especially in so-called "bikini season."
Unexpectedly, it was Hulu's Shrill Season 3 (released May 3) that gave me the messy-but-sexy bitch pep talk my soul needed to begin to process why it feels so scary to return after over a year away from the outside world. (And to whichever streaming gods rudely decided this would be Shrill's final season by failing to renew it, consider this article not only a petition but a vague threat urging you to correct such an egregious mistake.)
Starring Aidy Bryant, one of Saturday Night Live's greatest talents, Shrill is an adaptation of the equally great Lindy West's autobiographical book of the same name, detailing her life as an acclaimed New York Times opinion writer. While fictionalized, protagonist Annie follows a lot of the beats of West's life as a 20something fat woman with lots of outspoken opinions, success, and online trolls mad at her for it.
Delving into themes of body image issues, feminism, friendship, fatphobia, dating, queerness, and digital media, neither iterations of Shrill are at all about the pandemic. But it is a story centered on one woman's hilarious and chaotically beautiful journey to figuring out how to quiet down all the voices trying to tell her how she should be, so she can instead listen to the voice that knows she's already everything she needs to be.
That's a pretty evergreen premise. But it feels especially poignant during the strange in-between state many of us find ourselves in, as life-as-we-know-it opens back up and our calendars fill up with party invites, dinner dates, vacations, and non-Zoom work events.
Ultimately, Shrill Season 3 is an ode to the dance of conflicting emotions we're all navigating right now as we to return IRL social interactions — whether with the strangers we're sleeping around with, lifelong friends, coworkers, bosses, or an infamously racist separatist rural family you're assigned to profile as a journalist (OK, maybe that last one's a bit too show-specific).
Shrill Season 3 is an ode to the dance of conflicting emotions we're all navigating right now as we return to IRL social interactions.
From the very first moments of Season 3's opening scene, it's a nonstop rollercoaster of the fun, awkward, exhilarating, humiliating, empowering, and demoralizing experiences that often come with negotiating your internal needs with the external pressures of social norms. Newly single Annie is on a first date with some guy, it's going well, gettin' hot and heavy—until he prematurely ejaculates an unusually small load onto her wrist from a single touch.
That's not the embarrassing part, though. It's his inappropriately explosive and overly intimate meltdown afterward, which turns what could've been just one negligibly disappointing sexual experience into a red flag dealbreaker. The next morning, when Annie is finally able to quietly, kindly escape the dumpster fire nightmare of a date, they have an iconic exchange:
"Is it always this bad? Dating?†she asks, a look of wild fear in her eyes.
“No," he assures. "This was unusually awful.â€
There's no hostility — not even any negativity. Just an acknowledgment of an uncomfortable but shared reality. And it's pretty emblematic of just about every post-vaccination social experience I've had so far.
It is precisely this energy, this radical yet compassionate honesty, that I'm gonna need from all of us if we are really going to have our so-called Hot Vax Summer. It's a mentality we could all benefit from, as we encounter all the mildly traumatizing terrors of relearning how to be human in public together. I need it to survive all those flubbed exchanges that make me question why I ever even wanted to leave my house again in the first place.
But Shrill Season 3 is also a celebration of the vulnerable moments of connection that remind us why we could never really live without other people either. I mean, who are we really, if we can't go back to time-honored traditions like boozy girls' nights out where we get stupidly overdressed for a shitty dive bar just so we can post pictures that makes our crushes jealous?
Shrill is perfect for Hot Vax Summer because it excels at reckoning with the reality vs. the Instagram expectation disparity we're all experiencing as we finally do the thing we've been fantasizing about getting to do again for over a year.
Real life isn't necessarily worse than the superficiality of the Instagram fantasy version. But it certainly requires the right attitude to take the edge off the disappointments. It requires a sense of self that's fortified enough so you know that — no matter how much worse this is than the imagined ideal — you're still going to be OK anyway. Because at the end of the day, you are everything you need to survive. You are enough, whether or not your Hot Vax Summer crush likes you back.
Though Shrill thrives on the specificity of Annie's character (once again, brilliantly performed by Bryant, just to reiterate), she and the equally stellar supporting cast all bring arcs grounded in a relatable universality.
After spending over a year with nothing but our own interiority to keep us company, many folks learned a lot of new things about themselves—like maybe that you're more queer than you ever realized before (hi, it me). Well, Shrill's got your pandemic-inspired new gender identities and sexualities covered, too, with a sizzling non-binary love interest for Fran (played by the lovely Lolly Adefope), who is Annie's best friend.
Aside from being an energizing addition to the cast, non-binary actor E.R. Fightmaster's portrayal of Em feels personally tailored to lovingly reaffirm my own newfound queerness (they're really hot, OK, I'll just be respectful and leave it at that). Their relationship with Fran gives one representation of queer romance with all the happy lovey-doveyness that straight TV romances always get to luxuriate in. But it also doesn't shrink away from depicting the unique challenges that an interracial couple outside the cishet binary can face.
Or maybe Shrill's focus on interiority speaks to another unintended consequence of pandemic life. Many of us had begun to actually enjoy how the prolonged isolation offered us a break from the external pressures put on women to look and act a certain way in public. I myself stopped feeling the need to wear makeup, spend hours figuring out the perfect outfit, or taming my frizzy hair to fit traditional beauty standards. I gained some weight, which is not only normal for times of unprecedented anxiety and depression but also did not feel like a "problem" — until the threat of Hot Vax Summer reared its head.
As I face this return to public existence, I feel all the internalized misogyny, fatphobia, and various other forms of socialized self-hatred clamoring to rush back into my life.
As I face this return to public existence, I feel all the internalized misogyny, fatphobia, and various other forms of socialized self-hatred clamoring to rush back into my life and body. I find it harder to fight them back with each passing day.
But Shrill has been doing the hard internal work of keeping those patriarchal oppressions at bay for three whole seasons now. Despite what it sounds like — and what one rude asshole calls the show's core friend group at the dive bar — Shrill is not a Dove commercial. It does not sugarcoat or glamorize anything about being excluded from the mainstream ideals of society, nor does it make any attempt to capitalize on the traumas of marginalization.
It shows people who are typically rejected by society simply living, neither defined nor unaffected by those rejections. A lot of times, they live well, with an abundance of joy and happiness. Other times, they fuck up, upsetting other people or getting in the way of their own wellbeing. It shouldn't be so radical to see that on TV. But now more than ever (and sorry, we're still stuck with that overused phrase), it was the reassurance I needed that no other show in 2021 has been able to provide.
Shrill welcomes us all as we are post-pandemic: as imperfect, weird, and flawed as ever, sure. But not for any of the reasons that made your mother think she was helping by sending you to fat camp or mailing you diet bars in college.
We're imperfect because life is imperfect. So whether your Hot Vax Summer is drenched in the thirst of sweaty horned up skin-hungry bodies, or dry as a bone while you continue hibernation alone in air conditioning — that's exactly what your Hot Vax Summer should be, and all it needs to be.
Shrill Season 3 is streaming on Hulu.
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