Guide Me, TV: Drop Dead Diva

In Los Angeles, there are quite a few ads for Lifetime's new hour long dramedy - comerama? - Drop Dead Diva. In those ads, a confident, beaming plus sized woman. If left to my own devices, I would have said the show was about a beaming, confident plus sized woman. That's math! Tonight, I finally checked out what the world thinks a story about a plus sized woman in today's world is all about.



The world has brought us a fatty minstrel show.

The impetus for Drop Dead Diva is that model Deb Dobson dies in a car accident (she runs into a grapefruit truck) and demands to return to earth and inquires if she is in hell after she discovers she has landed in the body of chubby lawyer, Jane Bingum. Hilarity ensues as Deb copes with being super shallow with her new found gift of Jane's mega-brain all while being fat. Life is made more complicated for Deb when her boyfriend Grayson joins the firm that Jane works at. She still loves him, but believes he doesn't know that Jane exists because she's s bore.

Wait. No. That's not right. It's because she's fat.

In fact, Jane's life sucks so much because she's fat. Jane dresses dowdy, Jane isn't confident, Jane doesn't have a life. But all that can change because now Jane is Deb - and Deb can point out that people think Jane is dowdy, not confident, and without a life. Deb at one time exclaims her dismay over Jane's plate collection and how she doesn't want to be that girl. And as the audience, I don't want her to be that girl either. Not that I want Deb to change Jane, I want to go back in time and have the writers change Jane.

Is it really hard for America to believe that a woman who is a size 16 can be confident? Do we need for Jane to be Georgie Girl - to have another girl deep inside to say, "It's okay! The fatty is secretly a hot skinny blond!" In the series initial first four episodes, Deb learns that being overweight means society judges you, you go out with sub par looking men, and you get to eat anything you want. In one terrifying scene, Jane's assistant (played by Margaret Cho) soothes a panic attack with spraying E-Z Cheeze directly into Jane's mouth. But the real watermelon in this show are the use of doughnuts - the love/hate affair Deb now has, but indulges in now that she has Jane's body. Fat girls, we jus' love our doughnuts, sho nuff.



Irrefutable math.

The show isn't all stereotypical hell. The head partner, J. Parker (played by Josh Stamberg) is pretty spot on as a young, rich white male who runs the candy store. There are shades of Richard Fish from Ally McBeal in him - if only the writers would use him more. Margaret Cho is great as Jane's assistant (and I don't say this out of loyalty, even though All American Girl rocked so fucking hard), April Bowlby gives new dimensions in Deb's similarly shallow best friend Stacy and the only one who knows her secret (aside from her guardian angel) - she's one part Stacey Q and one part Amanda Seyfried.

Lead actress Brooke Elliott is loaded with charm, beauty, and poise that makes it hard for me to say bad things about this show. Watching her, unphotoshopped, doing her job playing an overweight Elle Woods can be so enjoyable until you remember that the premise of this show is that she isn't really Elle.

That means this is the premise of the show:




Here's the truth. What's going to touch and inspire girls who feel they don't fit the perfect model mode is not watching one lumber with the burden of being a size 16 and constantly bemoaning that fact; seeing a woman who is comfortable and confident with herself not despite her weight, not because of her weight, but because she is just confident.

(Of course, the biggest crime this show commits is only using TV and Movie's Linden Ashby - the biggest star to have been in both Mortal Kombat and The Young and the Restless for a few mere scenes. Criminal!)