Have you seen that hilarious show on VH-1 where tiny, washed-up celebrities like Verne Troyer have their femurs cracked and lengthened with painful metal braces in a last-ditch effort to impress indifferent casting directors? Or that inspiring NBC makeover series where sad, unfulfilled Baptists shed their Christ-love and reinvent themselves as healthy, confident Satanists?
Of course you haven't. Add a couple hundred pounds of blubber to the preceding paragraph, however, and things are different. Between greasy appetizers like VH-1's Celebrity Fit Club and the plate-sized cheese souffle that is NBC's The Biggest Loser, TV offers an all-you-can-eat buffet of fat people these days. But outside the audiences on Jerry Springer, where do you regularly see people of size whose presence on your TV screen doesn't revolve around their efforts to disappear? Despite the ever-broadening tent of cable, where every conceivable demographic gets a network of its own, the channel, or even the show, that caters to happy fat people doesn't exist. Even on the Food Network, most of the onscreen talent looks like they spend more time with rowing machines than gravy boats.
Meanwhile, the National Center for Health Statistics insists that 64.5 percent of adults are overweight and 4.7 percent are severely obese. While the metric used to determine such statistics, the body mass index, has its shortcomings, there's no denying that Americans are getting heavier.
No doubt many overweight Americans find The Biggest Loser appealing. But the producers get to have their cake and eat it, too—if the final course is a slice of inspirational metamorphosis as contestants flaunt their new slim selves, there are ample portions of humiliation along the way. On one episode, ice cream trucks ran herd on a pair of fat families as they raced across the Utah desert, pulling a load of huge sundaes behind them.
This, of course, is just reality TV's version of affirmative action—for years now, fit folks have been bobbing for dream spouses and gobbling donkey rectums for money. It's also true, however, that beyond such trivial degradations, the ultimate, endlessly reinforced message of The Biggest Loser and its brethren is that to be fat is to be physically grotesque, a burrito of neuroses, always a cupcake away from the grave.
I'll leave it for others to debate how accurate or not such characterizations are. What seems clear is that however many fat people yearn to be thin, there are millions more who are content to be fat, or at least resolved to the idea that they won't be fitting into a size 8 any time soon. For proof, simply look around America. Business Week reports that doughnut shops and burger chains are doing record business, and fried chicken is so popular KFC is thinking about calling itself Kentucky Fried Chicken again. City officials in Chicago ordered wider seats for the city's buses, The Chicago Tribune reports, "primarily because of people's growing bottoms." Books like Fat Politics and The Fat Girl's Guide to Life argue that being overweight is neither the medical nor social catastrophe it's invariably depicted to be.
According to Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth, fat people are, in an age of political correctness, society's new "open pariahs." Because it's now unacceptable to openly express one's disgust at ethnic minorities, gays, the poor and women, he suggests, fat people bear the burden of our scorn.
Perhaps this is why TV producers ignore the possibilities of fat-positive programming. They're afraid of upsetting the social order; without fat people, we'd have no convenient scapegoats to make us feel better about our own botched, petty lives.
This is virtuous, of course, but also troubling to those of us who place our faith in the pure venality of Hollywood. Think of the bottom line, guys—there's a market to exploit! And, really, if a glut of successful, fat-positive programming removes the moral taint from obesity, don't worry. People will still feel free to ridicule bald men and ladies with moustaches.
Greg Beato has written for Reason, Spin and The San Francisco Chronicle. Read more at
Soundbitten.com.