Dietland offers food for thought

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This article was published 02/06/2018 (2990 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the first episode of Dietland, our plus-size protagonist Plum Kettle (played by Joy Nash) is at a “Waist Watchers” meeting. She’s trying to lose weight before undergoing gastric bypass surgery, and she’s having a hard time.

The chipper group leader coos her understanding: “It can be hard to say goodbye to bad behaviours, like eating.”

It’s those bone-dry, blink-and-you-miss-’em jokes that define Dietland, creator Marti Noxon’s ink-black satire that premières Monday night on AMC.Based on Sarai Walker’s 2015 novel of the same name, the series follows Plum as she navigates the world in a body that’s both reviled and rendered invisible by society.

It doesn’t help that she works at a teen fashion magazine called Daisy Chain, answering letters from lost girls on behalf of her glamazon editrix, Kitty Montgomery (Julianna Margulies).

But a mysterious co-worker named Julia (Tamara Tunie) sees something in Plum, and it’s not long before Plum’s small and lonely life is blown wide open.

As Plum says: “On the way to becoming my best self, I became part of a revolution.”

Dietland hits on a constellation of timely issues, including misogyny, rape culture, beauty standards, body image, fat-shaming, radical fat acceptance, and the limitations of body positivity in a fatphobic society. Of course, all these issues are related — hello, patriarchy — but the effect can be disorienting, like scrolling through a Twitter feed.

It also sometimes feels like two distinct shows forced into one. On one hand, you have a treatise on the diet industrial complex, and how the beauty industry profits off the insecurities created by the magazine industry. On the other, you have the show’s dark subplot: a revenge fantasy about a violent vigilante justice group called Jennifer that’s kidnapping and murdering men accused of sexual assault, then dumping them off overpasses and throwing them out of planes.

Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that Dietland is a bold new entry into a growing pantheon of television focused on angry, complex women. (It’s actually one of two such shows Noxon has coming to television this summer; the other is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects, which arrives on HBO in July.)

A lot of ink has been spilled about prestige television moving away from the Don Draper/Tony Soprano/Walter White types, but it’s more than that: TV is finally moving past the one-dimensional “strong female lead” trope.

Many of the women who populate Dietland are exaggerated — this is a satire, after all — but they are not caricatures.

Nash’s performance as Plum is a standout. She thoughtfully captures what it’s like to feel hemmed in by your own life when you spend all your energy thinking about how to make your body smaller, and believing that happiness is a thin body. The absurdity and futility of that quest is illustrated by the opening credit sequence, in which a cartoon Plum scales a mountain of desserts, getting thinner and thinner as she ascends. By the time she reaches the summit, she’s a skeletal corpse — but hey, at least she’s at her goal weight, fitting into the red dress she purchased expressly for post surgery. You know, when her life will “begin.”

There’s a war brewing on the streets in Plum’s New York City. Murdered men are literally falling from the sky. But she’s fighting her own inner war, oscillating between conforming to society’s standards and actively rejecting them.

Perhaps more than anything else, Dietland is a show about how loving oneself is still a radical act — and what the world could look like if more women chose to riot instead of diet.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @JenZoratti