“Fat Actress”, the pseudo adventures of Kirstie Alley coping with life as something considerably more than a size 2, is a guilty pleasure that has enough smarts to it to quell any feelings of guilt. True, it’s not as sharp as Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO, another fictionalized, “true-life” improvised series to which it will inevitably be compared. Then again, it’s got a higher purpose than to just make us laugh. Alley, while also insuring that she has work keeping the money rolling in and her face before the public, is exorcising a few demons here. Not that that’s a bad thing. She plunges fearlessly into the material she co-wrote with her co-executive producer Brenda Hampton, showing a gift for self-parody that takes no prisoners. Here is a woman who opens the second episode trying on a series of pants that she can’t quite get over her hips, plump flesh spilling with abandon, and becoming more agitated with every failed attempt. The opening sequence of the very first episode shows her weighing herself and then collapsing in a weeping heap, barely able to crawl across the floor to answer the phone. Yet when she gets to that phone, it’s her agent offering her a Jenny Craig gig, she plays the blow to her ego equal parts wounded vanity, self-loathing, and a sweet vulnerability that somehow invites us to laugh not just with her, but at her as well.
The iconic moment comes in that first episode, when Alley, who has all but had a nervous breakdown after stepping on the scale and seeing where the needle lands in the first scene, struts her stuff through the executive suites as NBC. She’s putting on the performance of a lifetime pretending she thinks she looks fabulous in a belted ensemble while everyone, but everyone smiles hello and then, as soon as she passes, makes faces of astonishment and disgust that a human being would dare to be seen that way. Now there’s something, you’ll pardon the expression, to chew on.
Both the real Alley and her fictionalized persona on screen refuse to go quietly into the land of character roles just because of a waistline expansion. This Alley is still a sexual creature with a lovely face, a live-in hair and make-up person Kevyn (a wonderfully wired and wiry Racheal Harris), an obsession with Kid Rock (who makes an appearance with his own set of suprises), and enough moxie to almost overcome her endless neuroses and anxieties, ones that like the life she wants to lead, don’t begin and end with her dress size. She has smoothly turned the very reason she (putatively) couldn’t get work into the premise of a show that would, if nothing else, succeed in drawing an audience just to see how very fat she had become. If that isn’t having the last laugh, I don’t know what is.
Through run-ins with her crack-addicted brother and her parents that think her overeating is the family problem, a new boyfriend with money and one little problem, condescending next-door neighbor Mayim Bialik (as herself), NBC head honcho Jeff Zucker (also as himself) and a truckload of junk food, Alley takes one emotional pratfall after another with a sexy wardrobe and a dead-on sense of what’s funny that rarely fails. Not everything works. A bit about thinking herself smaller uses a little too much baby talk, for example.
For the difference between television Alley and the real deal, there is the on-the-set feature on disc 2. With the first sentence out of her mouth, there’s no doubt that the speaker is not just a smart woman, but a savvy one. Her confrontation elsewhere with the paparazzi who shows up on her set and who become the hunted is divine. The commentary tracks that Alley does with various members of cast and crew are a mixed bag, with moments such as Alley noticing her back fat and fretting about the alignment of her lower teeth. It comes across as another performance, and that’s what the series is about. Let’s have more of the other Alley on the commentary.
FAT ACTRESS chooses fun over angst while taking welcome aim at the stresses of living up to the impossible expectations the media imposes. So go ahead, laugh. And have the cheesecake.
Your Thoughts?