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Photo credit: KRT Entertainment
Kirstie Alley
Almost everything about “Fat Actress” is crazily, rudely and recklessly over the top. It’s not just hilarious, it’s also fearless, going where no woman has gone before – or, more to the point, no woman the size and shape of Kirstie Alley.
Alley’s dimensions, which wouldn’t bring a second glance if she worked in a school or an office, are considered shockingly inappropriate – no, make that indecent – for a TV and movie star. Who hasn’t seen a picture of the former “Cheers” Emmy winner looking big and blowsy on the cover of some tabloid, with a headline clucking that this onetime hot chick has willfully allowed herself to swell to the size of a prize dairy cow? In fact, as Alley has observed in interviews that have appeared in almost every magazine short of National Geographic and Forbes, getting fat was easy. All she had to do was relax and stop monitoring every morsel of food that went into her mouth, the way many actresses admit they must if they want to stay in the game. Her punishment for the sin of fatness was twofold: She stopped getting job offers and she started getting catcalls. Her response is “Fat Actress.” Like Larry David’s great “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” this weekly half-hour takes a show-business insider, almost by definition a larger-than-life character, and inflates the absurdities of her life to wildly farcical proportions. The pilot’s opening scene is hysterical in both senses of the word. As overwrought classical music booms in the background, Alley weighs herself on her bathroom scale. The number she sees makes her slump to the floor as if she’s been stabbed, crying, “Omigod, omigod!” Can things get worse? Of course. Alley’s agent calls with a job offer: How’d she like to be a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig? Her response is not printable. Her friend and “Look Who’s Talking” co-star, John Travolta, arrives to comfort her and suggest that she’d be happier, not to mention more employable, if she were to lose a pound or two or 70. But John Goodman works, she protests. So does “James Gandolfino,” as Alley calls him, “and he’s as big as a whale!” But they’re men, says Travolta, who, one can’t help noticing, has put on some pounds since his disco days. It’s different for men. “I can play a man!” Alley half-yelps, half-pleads. And so she goes, careening between self-abasement and crazed overconfidence. At an interview with NBC, Alley flounces flirtatiously down the hallways, wagging her XL derriere behind her, as incredulous executives murmur the F-word, “She fat! She’s so fat!” under their breath. Slyly, and with infectious glee, creators Alley and Brenda Hampton, who, before she dreamed up “7th Heaven,” earned her sitcom stripes on “Mad About You” lampoon not just the actress’ vanity and desperation but the incredulous reactions to her size. She used to be a babe, and now she’s a tub! And she’s flaunting it! Is that gross, or what? Boldly, they even take on the “Baby Got Back” thing, the idea that black men like their women extra-bootylicious. Alley’s quest to bag a brother backfires, pardon the expression, in one scene, only to culminate in an encounter with an NBC exec (Mark Curry, “Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper”) that’s both very funny and exuberantly sexy. So Alley thinks she can be hot and heavy? As a matter of fact, she does. Except when she doesn’t. And if you’ve got a problem with her or her ambivalence, go watch “America’s Next Top Model.” Saner than Alley, if only by Hollywood standards, are her scheming assistant, Eddie (Bryan Callen, “Mad TV”), and her flaky hair-and-makeup person, Kevyn (Rachael Harris), both of whom have some delicious moments. And if it weren’t enough to have one Travolta in the pilot, there’s also the lovely Mrs. T, Kelly Preston, who’s perfection as a narrow-as-an-arrow diet guru who preaches the benefits of bulimia and tobacco, not smoking it, you understand, but eating it. Speaking of understanding, I confess that I don’t know what to make of Alley’s lingerie-intensive wardrobe, which makes her look like a madam at a bordello owned by Victoria’s Secret. And it would be nice if the show didn’t picture her repeatedly stuffing herself with burgers and junk food, as if being overweight were synonymous with the “Super Size Me” diet. As you’ve probably read, the real Jenny Craig people, after hearing about the backhanded compliment paid to their weight-loss business in the pilot, offered Alley a job, no joke this time, as their spokeswoman. She accepted, and reportedly has lost weight practicing what she is paid to preach. So what happens to the show if, by next season, Kirstie is a skinny actress? I’m not worried. Whether she uses real sugar or the zero-calorie stuff, Alley obviously knows how to take lemons and make lemonade. ___ FAT ACTRESS10 p.m. EST Monday, repeated 11 p.m. Monday and 10 p.m. March 11 Showtime ___ c 2005, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Visit JSOnline, the Journal Sentinel’s World Wide Web site, at http://www.jsonline.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
