This story seems as if someone saw AMC's excellent show "Dietland"  and thought to themselves, "I think I can take this idea and make it a nice, light comedy." Unfortunately, it's the biting humor of that show that made it great. "Shrill" is supposed to be a comedy about an overweight millennial, but it's not very funny. I do find the show interesting, though, so I'll probably keep watching. I've read that it gets better as the show progresses.

"Saturday Night Live's" Aidy Bryant plays an unhappy young woman, Annie, who wants to write more articles for her employer's trendy magazine. She has casual regular sex with a guy who clearly doesn't care much about her.  She has a good friend, her roommate Gwen, and two loving parents. Her father has cancer, so they're dealing with that. She seems like an average woman who's not very satisfied with her life and generally lets people push her around.

Annie wants to change her life, but she's tired of people focusing on her weight rather than seeing her as a real person. She doesn't want to (or can't?) lose weight. She just wants to be successful and treated like a normal human being. During the show, she changes and stands up for herself more.

Of course, you should treat everyone like regular human beings, even those who are very overweight.  However, if you are as heavy as she seems to be, and unhappy, it seems that losing weight is the answer (at least in part). Mind you, I hate seeing people that young who are overweight because I know it only gets worse as you get older (being overweight myself for the past 20 years). The weight gets harder to lose, and you start to have other health issues.  All of these people on TV that say (as Samantha Bee did recently) that not everyone who's fat is unhealthy or needs to lose weight...I really don't buy it. We do have an obesity problem in this country, and this is part of the problem. On the flipside of that, though, is that most of us think we're fat, even if we're not. As with most issues, America is a mass of contradictions.

This girl Annie definitely needs to lose weight. It's not "normal" to be in your 20's and have double chins like that. She should be exercising and eating healthy, though, not dieting.  People should stop fad diets and just eat healthy.  However, that's not a very exciting TV show premise. The show focuses on the humor in her situation when people treat her badly, and how she deals with it.  It's a light-hearted sort of humor.

I like most of the message of the show (that you shouldn't treat "fat" people differently or shame them), and I like the characters. I'll keep watching to see what happens. I really liked how they addressed abortion in the first episode as if it were just an unpleasant operation. You don't see that very often on TV or movies. Kudos to them.