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Writer Lindy West, whose 2016 memoir was turned in Hulu series “Shrill,” has revealed she felt “weird and invisible” during the three years she spent making the show – in part due to her colleagues.
West relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles to make “Shrill,” which starred Aidy Bryant in the lead role. Bryant was also a co-creator alongside Ali Rushfield.
In her latest memoir, “Adult Braces,” which is out today, West details how a gap in Hulu’s schedule meant the show was picked up straight to series despite the fact she hadn’t event finished writing a pilot. However, arriving in L.A. with what she describes as a “naive positivity,” she soon discovered that “all the seasoned TV people were working flat out to meet our deadlines. They didn’t have much time or patience for Take Your Author to Work Day, no matter how nice I was.”
Once she got into the writers’ room, there was further disappointment as her story was taken apart. “The lead would no longer be named Lindy. The show would no longer be set in Seattle. The character written to represent [West’s eventual husband] Aham would no longer be a love interest.”
“I got an identity crisis,” West says. “It’s extremely corrosive to an already weak mind to be making a show about the most vulnerable and embarrassing parts of your own life, sitting in writers’ rooms listening to skinny white guys from Harvard debating, ‘So what season should we have the dad die?’ Your actual dad, who’s actually dead. Only for it to be decided that he shouldn’t die at all, because it isn’t funny when dads die.”
West says she was given a variety of excuses for the changes, including the fact it was what the studio wanted and in order to protect the show from litigation. “[B]ut taken altogether, I couldn’t escape the fact that my input seemed to be largely a courtesy. And I don’t mean that I was overruled in the normal ways you hear about in Hollywood — noted to death by executives or forced to dumb down and chase ratings— I mean that as the weeks went by, I began to sense that I was being handled. I would show up at a meeting and get the feeling that everyone else had spoken privately already.”
She also details how the cast and some of the creatives, including the writers and producers, would hang out together outside of work and post pictures on Instagram. “I wasn’t invited,” she reveals.
When one of her friends, Samantha Irby, was cut from the Season 2 writers’ room, West says she decided to speak up. “When I finally got the guts up to complain— sobbing on the phone to producers who didn’t have time— I found that even the origin story had shifted under my feet: It was some magic in Aidy that had brought us all to this moment, because the show would never have gotten made without a star attached. A real star. Not me. Her magic. Not mine. Not ours.”
West says in the new memoir that while she did have some input in the show – including approving props, writing scripts and casting the dog –“’Shrill’ was never my show, and in the ways that matter to me, I was never really there.”
“My real personality wasn’t in the room and didn’t often make it onto the screen, and while I loved my coworkers, I didn’t become close with people in a way that made me feel at home or might have gotten me more TV jobs after ‘Shrill’ was canceled. I was given the illusion of power while the real deciders had private calls without me, and you can only be undermined so many times on an adaptation of your own life before you start to question whether you even know who you are.”
When the show was eventually canceled in 2021 after three seasons, West says “I was strangely relieved.” Three months later, she says she received a package from the production office that seemed to confirm how her colleagues felt about her: a book of behind-the-scenes photographs that didn’t feature a single picture of West while a Post-It note stuck to the front misspelled her name.
English (US) ·