Writer Lindy West criticized ‘skinny white guys from Harvard’ working on the Hulu series Shrill, saying the adaptation of her 2016 memoir was completely changed and that she was ultimately pushed out by coworkers.
West, 44, said that during the making of the series, which stars former SNL star Aidy Bryant, she did not have much say over the storyline adapted from her memoir, and shifted the blame on those in the writers’ room.
‘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 a writers’ room 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 detailed in her latest memoir Adult Braces, Variety reported.
West believed that the changes being made to the story by the writers weren’t reflective of her memoir, and she claimed in her latest book that she had an ‘identity crisis.’
Those changes included the main characters name not being her own, the setting being moved from Seattle, and the character written as West’s husband would no longer be a love interest, the outlet reported.
But her lack of input wasn’t the only thing that she felt kept her alienated during the three years of working on set, as her book complained of whispers behind her back and little attention from her coworkers.
West said she had arrived in Los Angeles with ‘naive positivity,’ and that many of the seasoned television crews working on the show didn’t have time to show her the ropes.
‘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,’ she wrote.
Lindy West, 44, said that in the making of the series ‘Shrill,’ which stars former SNL star Aidy Bryant, she felt out of control of the story adapted from her memoir and left out by her peers
The Hulu series Shrill, starring Bryant, was cancelled in 2021
West said ‘skinny white guys from Harvard’ took over the writers’ room and stripped her memoir into a completely new adaptation for the TV show
As the project continued on, West said that she ‘couldn’t escape the fact that my input seemed to be largely a courtesy.’
‘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,’ she said, according to the outlet.
‘I would show up at a meeting and get the feeling that everyone else had spoken privately already.’
Then she would scroll through social media and see the writers and producers hanging out outside of work and posting pictures on Instagram, while West drearily wrote that she ‘wasn’t invited.’
West said she was able to approve props, write scripts and cast the dog, but she felt that the show ‘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,’ West wrote.
‘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.’
West said she would scroll through social media and see the writers and producers hanging out outside of work and posting pictures on Instagram, while she ‘wasn’t invited’
While West said that she was able to approve props, writing scripts and casting the dog, the show ‘was never my show, and in the ways that matter to me, I was never really there’
West said that much of her latest memoir is ‘grappling with the psychological fallout of realizing I’d made myself into a brand and being kind of trapped in it’
‘Shrill’ was canceled in 2021, which West said came as a strange relief. Three months later, she received a package with a book.
The book from the production office contained all the behind-the-scenes pictures, with West in none of them. Then, to top it all off, there was a Post-It note stuck to the front that misspelled her name.
West told Willamette Weekly: ‘So much of [Adult Braces] is grappling with the psychological fallout of realizing I’d made myself into a brand and being kind of trapped in it.’
Adult Braces, according to West’s website, is the story of her ‘rock bottom’ as well as her time taking a solo cross-country trip to ‘claw her way out of it.’
‘With her trademark candor and sense of humor, she examines her post-Shrill emotional implosion, her shifting feelings about traditional marriage, and her search for her long-lost self,’ the site explains.
‘The result is an engaging and laugh-out-loud narrative of becoming as Lindy transforms from a passenger into the active navigator of her own life.’
The Daily Mail reached out to West’s reps for comment.
