But we’ve never seen it deployed quite like this: as a woman’s fantasy of another woman, and really, of herself. Annie is drawn not to an idealized body, but to an idealized way of being. In “Shrill,” the shot dispels the stress, shame and self-hatred that can accompany being a woman in a swimsuit. “It’s such a freeing thing to float in water,” Bryant has said of the shot, and yet “it’s such a fraught experience for so many women.” The episode, “Pool,” imagines what it might be like for those tensions to dissipate.

The swimming pool is among the most alluring symbols of summer, and Hollywood has both reflected and shaped its mystique . The pool is a shimmering mirage of wealth, sex and fun that beckons the viewer toward dark undercurrents of loss, sin and death. The pool’s very architecture suggests hidden depths. The waterline is the boundary between the stated and implied, our consciousness and our dreams.

The pool represents a lot of things, but it has also served as a straightforward tool for satisfying the male gaze on film. It is a pretense for babes to appear. But recently female creators have reframed the pool as something new: a place where a woman can be the complicated subject, with her own issues and her own fantasies.

Men are allowed to float through pop culture, their half-naked time drifting atop a pool doubling as a signal of emotional profundity. But for women, the pool is often filmed as a flat, uncomplicated pleasure. These women are typically beautiful, young, thin and white. They are filmed in water as if it is their natural habitat, and the bikini their everyday uniform. They are all Elle Woods, floating into Harvard Law.