Review | ‘Shrill’ and ‘Turn Up Charlie’ are passably cool TV shows that try too hard to be passably cool TV shows

Aidy Bryant as Annie in “Shrill.” By Hank Stuever Hank Stuever TV critic Email Bio Follow TV critic March 14 at 11:51 AM A new TV show can have all the makings of success and still be missing that final, almost ineffable varnish that makes all the difference.

“Shrill” , stars “Saturday Night Live’s” Aidy Bryant as Annie, a Portland woman who writes calendar listings for the hip alternative newspaper and yearns to break free from that which confines her: the snide boss who won’t let her write essays and feature stories; the emotionally stunted lover who is embarrassed to be seen with her; the mother whose feelings of concern also entail a lifetime of undermining remarks about weight gain; the anonymous online troll who delights in tormenting Annie...

Being all of those things means watching as “Shrill” checks off a laundry list of current concerns, which, besides fat-shaming, includes dating rituals, sexism, workplace etiquette and basic rights — both the personal kind and the constitutional. In the first episode, Annie belatedly discovers that the morning-after pill is dosed for women who weigh less than 175 pounds, which means she’s pregnant and needs an abortion.

This particular genre of dramedy can be reduced to a simple phrase: “Welcome to my world.” It involves more portraiture than plot, absorbing us less in what happens than what is felt in everyday, quasi-autobiographical encounters. Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” sits at one extreme of this format; Lena Dunham’s “Girls” on another. Recent triumphs in this vein include Issa Rae’s “Insecure” on HBO and Pamela Adlon’s “Better Things” on FX, both of which prefer intimacy to explication.

Charlie’s boyhood friend, David , has come back to England as a well-known star of American action movies, accompanied by his successful music-producer/DJ wife, Sara and their tweenage daughter, a hellion named Gabby who runs off nannies faster than a Von Trapp kid.

So glad I ditched cable tv years ago!

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I’m down with that. Sort of.

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