Her best friend Campbell (the delightful Celeste Pechous) is a great compliment to Abby’s immovability. I don’t think it will be a smooth or linear road to wellness for Abby, but the first half of the season made available for critics lays out an earnest effort to build trust in the storytellers (and the community of characters) for when the rough times eventually come.Ībby’s family is lovely. It’s about coming out of the loneliness of queerness, middle age, and the Midwest, chiefly through the twin pillars of hope and community. There’s a really warm heart in this bleak midwinter debut. With buttery, wry humor, the series digs at the loneliness and isolation one can feel as a queer person under capitalism, where one is stigmatized for an array of things that make daily life drudgery. Work in Progress follows Chicago comedian Abby McEnany, playing a version of herself, as she labors through queer life, trying to make it better (one almond at a time) before she kills herself. It boldly confronts representation in a bar - before promptly fainting. Work in Progress takes a heartfelt new perspective that pushes the conversation of representation in very exciting ways. Showtime’s latest additions The L Word: Generation Q and Work in Progress represent two illuminating turns in conversation: The L Word reboot reflects on its own legacy as a landmark series for queer lives on television and tries to build from it. We must be reaching a change in how we create and critique queer representation in media. Season 3 of “ Shrill” premieres on Hulu March 7.Abby McEnany’s autobiographical Showtime series is a wry, funny, deeply queer breath of fresh air. I think a lot of my difficulty there was my own sense of entitlement, like, ‘I’m a genius, why aren’t you putting me in everything?!'” I didn’t see the big picture - like anyone wouldn’t at 30 but would at 60. “I had my dramas, but I was myopic about myself. “It was such a great opportunity,” she explains. “I just look at her and think, ‘Wow, you have so many skills that I took 25 years to get.’ Like just to be able to give plain clear instructions to people and not get too caught up in having to be everybody’s best friend.”Īnd Sweeney looks back on her four-year run on “SNL” fondly - with the benefit of a little hindsight. She’s the best person to work with she’s just funny and fun and so much more responsible than I would have been if I was running the show at her age,” Sweeney raves. “Just the whole thing of playing her mom is a dream. It also doesn’t hurt that she loves working with Bryant. Sweeney’s awareness of how lucky she was to be able to bounce back makes “Shrill” and her other gigs like “Work in Progress” and “American Gods” all the more sweeter. Sweeney plays Aidy Bryant’s mom in “Shrill.” ©Hulu/Courtesy Everett Collection “I thought, ‘Oh I really f–ked up! I really dropped the ball … then it really became important for me to come back and then it wasn’t until the last few years that I realized how likely it was that I would not be able to get my career back,” she says. Sweeney says she was content with her decision - until her daughter went to high school and became more independent. Meanwhile, the “God Said Ha!” star is back playing Aidy Bryant’s mother in the Hulu series “Shrill” after a decade-long absence that saw her essentially drop out of showbiz and move to Chicago to raise her daughter with husband Michael Blum. But she does concede that if she could do it over, there’s one thing she would change: She “wouldn’t Pat unattractive.” Julia Sweeney as “Pat” and now. Sweeney, 61, says she “actually loved Pat,” despite the character’s boom-and-bust turn in the spotlight. But also, Pat was conventionally unattractive and intentionally gross - so I definitely got laughs on that.” “In my mind, I was actually trying to explore how uncomfortable not having a gender was for the people around that person,” she tells Page Six. Given the climate around non-binary individuals and gender at large today, it goes without saying that Pat has not aged well.īut Spokane native Sweeney says that while she’s criticized for the character, she never intended for Pat to be hurtful. Sweeney’s character, an androgynous person whose impossible-to-determine gender made people around her uncomfortable, was one of the show’s most popular recurring bits in the early 1990s, even getting a feature film adaptation (which turned out to be a box-office dud). Of all of her “Saturday Night Live” tenure’s roster of impressions and characters, Julia Sweeney says she still gets “a lot of s–t” for one.
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