Why I love Drop Dead Diva (and other weighty issues)

Every spring, my mother goes through a yearly ritual. She realizes she needs bathing suits, orders a bunch from Land’s End, and then goes to her room to try them on (usually with my sister and me in tow to voice opinions). Regardless of what she tries on, she will twist and turn to look at herself in the mirror, muttering a constant litany of “fat, fat, fat, fat, fat,” while she does so.

Of course, she never keeps the bathing suits (probably because she thinks they make her look fat), so she packs them up, sends them lovingly back to where they came from, and waits another year to start the cycle all over again. The same thing happens when she goes clothes shopping, when she gets dressed for a special occasion, and sometimes just because.

It doesn’t matter how many times I tell her she’s not that fat, how many times I point out that for a woman that’s nearing sixty, who’s always been curvier, who’s been through two pregnancies (one of which was with twins that were both over six pounds), and who has a bad leg that keeps her from serious exercise, she looks pretty damn good. It doesn’t matter that I like her exactly how she is, which is soft, and yes, a little squashy, and mom-shaped. When she looks in the mirror, she sees fat.

This isn’t exactly a sensation that’s new, or limited to my mother. The average woman in America is a size fourteen. The average woman on TV? Well … let’s just say they aren’t that size, exactly. For years, networks have been trying to cash in on that by featuring shows on weight loss, the joys of exercise, plastic surgery, or re-inventing yourself. And for years, they’ve been doing it wrong.

Weight, like any hot button issue, has two ways it can be portrayed: exploitatively, or well. It’s so easy to fall back onto exploiting it, like in FOX’s new series More to Love, by buying into this idea that there are two types of people: fat ones and skinny ones. Fat people are portrayed as more enlightened, able to see past appearance and to the soul within. They tell it like it is. And they are confident in their own appearance (with women, often in the snapping-in-z-formation way), yet desperately and paradoxically long to be thin.

And this disproportionately affects women, who these shows are inevitably aimed at. It’s women who shoulder the paradox of where the line between anorexic and blimp is, feeling guilty either way — like if they’re fat they’re unhealthy, but if they’re skinny, they must have also been unhealthy somehow to get there.  Skinny girls often long for less boyish figures so they will look like “real women,” while larger women long to give their thighs up to these skinny girls coveting them. It’s a no-win game, and television only ever seems to make it worse, to get into that divide and use one side’s insecurities to bait the other.

Enter Drop Dead Diva.

The premise of this show is genius in ways Tyra Banks longs to be. A skinny, aspiring model named Deb dies. In heaven, she accidentally presses a reset button, which sends her back to earth … in the body of Jane (played by newcomer Brooke Elliott), an over-worked, overweight lawyer. She is essentially two people in one: Jane’s smarts and some of her memories, mixed with Deb — all of Deb.

Instead of instantly slimming Jane down in a teen-movie montage that involves a lot of singing into hairbrushes and giggling, Deb struggles with her new body, with the memory of what it was like to be pretty, and confident, and fawned over, and the reality of being, well, plain Jane. What do you do when your body is crying out for that eclair, but you know you’re supposed to eat granola? How do you fit in time to exercise and have a career? Why aren’t you good enough the way you are?

The way this show deals with these questions (and more) is refreshingly honest. It doesn’t hate on anyone; fat, thin, shallow, or smart. I feel good about my body after watching it, instead of guilty like when I watch The Biggest Loser, or read any discussion or article about weight in America. The message is about loving yourself for whoever and whatever you are, and doing the best you can with it, and it isn’t smash-you-in-the-face cheesy in a way that makes you feel like you’re part of some cosmic sisterhood, or something equally ridiculous.

I don’t know how it took so long for us to get a show like this. I don’t know why we don’t have more shows like this. All I know is, as long as this show is around, and keeps doing what it does, I’ll keep tuning in. And maybe someone, somewhere, will get the hint.

Clacked by Julia Hass
on Jul 28, 2009 @ 12:00 EST5EDT