Which is not to say that Annie doesn’t face size-related challenges. Her journey from self-consciousness to liberation over an afternoon at the pool is a microcosm of the journey she goes on over the six-episode season, from timidity and self-doubt, to empowerment and self-acceptance. Early episodes starkly portray the extent to which her shape is disapproved of in public – strangers give her backhanded compliments (“You remind me of Rosie O’Donnell”), and a personal trainer in a coffee shop even offers to “help” her free the thin person “trapped” inside her. “That was incredibly relatable for me,” says Lane. “I have lost count of the times people have said to me: ‘You have such a pretty face’, or ‘Oh my gosh, you will look so beautiful when you lose X, Y and Z pounds.’”

Almost as radical as Annie’s storylines in Shrill is her wardrobe: it features bright, fresh florals, printed dresses, and a sexy sequined party number, all as covetable as that of any female protagonist in a contemporary TV show. However, the show’s costume designer, Amanda Needham, has revealed that the majority of the outfits had to be made from scratch because choice in shops is so limited. “Once you get to a certain size, people sort of want you to disappear,” she recently told New York magazine.

The last acceptable prejudice

Weight, it seems, is the only stigma still deemed socially acceptable, and overweight people the only marginalized group deserving of public disapprobation. Brown points to a recent study that looked at rates of implicit bias – or prejudice, in simpler terms. “It showed that around issues such as sexual orientation, gender and race, we are seeing levels of implicit bias go down, but we are seeing body-related bias go up,” she says. This certainly seems to hold true in Hollywood. In the last few years, it has made very vocal efforts to be more representative when it comes to gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation on screen; body diversity, however, is still lagging far behind.