Tag Archives: television

Huge: When a Fat-Positive TV Series Transcends Its Source Material

Lynne Murray says:

I heard a lot about the TV series, Huge, before I found out it was based on a book by the same name. I watched the  clip of the scene that opens the series where the incandescently subversive Nikki Blonsky turns a fat camp weigh-in into a rebellious (and hot) striptease act.

I had watched all the episodes and the audio commentary before I learned the series was based on a book by Sasha Paley.

The book (unlike the TV series) should come with a trigger warning for recovering dieters. Reading it could easily bring up some unwanted flashbacks to Diet-Think. Each chapter begins with a list of what was eaten (usually not much) and how much was exercised. One camper tells another to be sure to record what she just ate, saying, “If you bite it, you write it.” The level of body snark is off the charts, with constant jealousy of thinner campers and descriptions of disgust at larger ones.

Slightly easier to endure is the rebellious Wilhelmina, who declares that if forced to go to fat camp, she will try to gain weight simply to embarrass her parents, but it’s hard to sympathize with her cruel treatment of … pretty much everybody. All the other characters live in a toxic atmosphere of anxiety around food, body size, and social isolation relieved by unsuccessful attempts to get with the cool kids or avoid the fatter kids.

Rebecca, an insightful Amazon commenter puts it well:

I ordered Huge after falling in love with the utterly endearing ABC Family series of the same name. Screen adaptations rarely live up to their original source material, so I was expecting big things (no pun intended) from Paley’s novel. But if you’re like me and are interested in seeing how the book compares to the television show, you’re going to be disappointed.

Beyond the title, the name of the main character, and the fact that it’s set at a fat camp, the book bears few similarities to its TV counterpart. The show is everything the book is not–complex, charming, layered, sweet, funny, sad. The characters, so real and so vulnerable on screen, are nothing more than cardboard stereotypes on the page. None of the show’s most interesting personalities (Alistair, Becca) are present in the book. There is no camper-counselor flirtation that parallels the George-Amber storyline, nor is there any mention of the fractured relationship between the camp director (here a bubbly redhead called “Melanie”) and her father. Pretty much all of the elements that make the TV series sparkle are noticeably absent, leaving us with a straightforward “summer camp” story, and not a particularly interesting one at that.

The TV series Huge is funny without turning the characters into fat jokes and heartfelt without forcing stereotypes on the characters. It tells a screen story that centers around and humanizes fat people, something that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen before in television or movies. The actors  are all amazing. The audio commentary provides some insight into the casting process; I was so touched by the statement in passing that the cinematography highlighted the actors’ beauty and that is a rarity for fat actors. The insight, brilliant execution and loving attention to detail illuminate the project as a labor of love, as well as a family affair–the primary authors Winnie Holzman and Savannah Dooley are a mother and daughter and Paul Dooley, the actor playing the camp director’s father is Holzman’s husband and Dooley’s father.

Holzman, Tony award winning author of the book for the Broadway musical, Wicked, and creator of the ABC TV series  My So-Called Life and her daughter talk about casting in this interview:

In L.A., with everyone trying to be as skinny as possible, how was the casting process for this show?

Winnie Holzman: For eight to 10 weeks I was saying in casting, “That person is not fat enough.”

Savannah Dooley: Casting this show was a big challenge. It was a terrifying process. I was horrified. I am a critical person. I obviously have strong feelings about how fatness is portrayed in the media. So when I hear about a show like this, in my mind I’m already thinking, how skinny are these “fat kids” going to be? We can’t half-ass this. We have to have someone who is big enough. We have to have people who look like real people.

Full-assed.

Winnie Holzman: Yes, exactly, full-assed (laughs). We did end up finding them in L.A.

Savannah Dooley: It means so much more being able to give actors this [chance] because of the limitations Hollywood is already going to be putting on them.

Winnie Holzman: We felt it. We felt right away this feeling of gratitude that we could be a part of something that would give opportunity to kids.

Savannah Dooley: Something that has frustrated us, for my whole time growing up, was the token fat character that was always a joke.

Winnie Holzman: That is a big, inspirational part of our show. We are busting through that. That is a lot of what the show is about. It is about these people who are outsiders who are finally finding a place for themselves in the world. They are feeling themselves for the first time as themselves and not just as the fat person.

Watching Huge has the profound effect of normalizing the actors’ fat bodies. I once spent a week at a NAAFA convention and, with a similar total immersion effect, the media conditioning of decades faded away. I could see my fellow fat people (and myself) as simply human without the wrongness that we have learned to attach to large bodies. That experience alone is worth more than its weight in gold and I would urge anyone who hasn’t seen the series to watch it if only for the “size acceptance in a box” factor.

Ironically, the fat camp setting of the book may be the only place where viewers will accept a story with so many fat actors, because the teenage campers are seen as trying to overcome fatness. (When I searched online for information on the fat camp phenomenon, Wikipedia was one of very few sites I could find that was not an actual ad for or article endorsing fat camps.)

The question of why the ABC Family television network wanted Huge is answered by looking at the website which, as of 2010, offered answers to nutritional and exercise questions for those “wondering if a bagel or muffin is healthier” etc. My best guess is that ABC wanted a slightly edgier take on teen body image issues and ideally hoped for a bite of The Biggest Loser payday. Unfortunately, ratings were not spectacular enough to get the show extended past its first ten episodes.

Fortunately the DVD edition makes Huge accessible long term. The series broke new ground. I hope others will learn from its excellence just how to dramatize fat characters with depth and insight.

The Biggest Loser: Now Teaching Weight Cycling and Bullying to the Next Generation

Lynne Murray says:

We value children in America, but some more than others. Many, if not most, fat children learn very early that approval and sometimes even affection will be withheld unless and until they lose weight. Since no reliable method exists that will guarantee weight loss or prevent weight gain for most people, children–even toddlers–are thrown into a world of food deprivation and body anxiety. They would have to do the impossible simply to be accepted and loved.

The Biggest Loser (Golda Poretsky calls it Yelling at Fat People) gains a great deal of traction from the myth that extreme food reduction and extreme exercise cause permanent weight loss For an explosion of that lie, see Ottawa physician Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. on how this combination actively damages a person’s metabolism, setting up victims for short-term drastic weight loss followed by nearly unavoidable long-term weight regain

Now The Biggest Loser aims to extend its franchise to teach a new generation of young fat people just how worthless they are and how acceptable it is to let thin trainers bully them “for their own good.”  In a blog post coupled with a campaign to protest NBC’s decision to air this show for teenagers, Golda Poretsky describes this new frontier of child abuse:

Why should adults have all the fun of enforced starvation, dehydration, and emotional abuse on national TV? … [T]wo 13-year-olds and a 16-year-old … Are competing, sort of, in Season 14 of The Biggest Loser. But don’t worry, The Biggest Loser producers have the kids’ best interest at heart. The kids aren’t really competing. They’re just going to be “mentored.” It sounds like they’re just going to endure the dangerous aspects of the show without weigh-ins or any hope of winning money from it. I guess having the kids compete for money would send the wrong message. You wouldn’t want the kids to think that life is a competition where winning money is the important thing. They should definitely get the message that being thin is the only important thing. Way to go, NBC. Nice work.

Two authors who have written about fat adults are researching fat children’s experience for upcoming books and finding the stories of childhood suffering excruciating. Rebecca Jane Weinstein, author of Fat Sex: The Naked Truth (see my August 2012 review here) talks about the “profound pain” expressed in interviews for her upcoming book, Fat Kids: Truth and Consequences (Kickstarter fundraiser page at the link).

Kids are struggling. Fat kids, skinny kids, girl kids, and boy kids. The pressure to be thin is overwhelming. I was just a precursor to the devastation that is happening to kids because of weight, bullying, shame, fear, pills, surgeries, and profound pain. The childhood obesity crisis around the world may be troubling, but not only because kids might be fatter. And everyone, kids, their parents, and all the good intentioned people trying to protect the kids from their fat bodies, need to know the truth and consequences. We must protect their hearts, souls, and sanity as well. These are stories of fat kids, former fat kids, and kids who think they are fat.

Weinstein says:

[T]the interviews are sometimes hard for me to process. I cry with the people, not only after, although I try not to. I cry after as well, and then I am profoundly grateful for what they have shared. Their stories have put a tremendous amount in perspective, have helped me feel appreciated, shown me that I have a real purpose in life, and I know they have to be shared.

Lonie McMichael, PhD. is the author of Talking Fat: Health vs. Persuasion in the War on our Bodies and Acceptable Prejudice? Fat, Rhetoric and Social Justice, due in 2013 from Pearlsong Press. She is currently working on The Unlovable Child: Collateral Damage in the War on Obesity, described as a look at how …

… we have put our children on diets, forced them to exercise, and told them just how bad fat is all in the name of health. Yet, our children are not getting healthier or skinnier. What they are getting is terrified of being fat. In addition, if they are fat, they are being bullied and shamed – by their peers, by society, by the adults who supposedly care about them, even by our government – in misguided attempts at weight loss. Using the experiences of adults who were fat children … she explores the ways in which adults have healed from such traumas….[and] the long-term effects of trying to make our children into one-size-fits-all health obsessed drones.

Sharing stories can help, for example Cat Oake, the very confident woman who maintains Cat’s House of Fun (motto: “Changing the World’s View of Fat Chicks, One Visitor at a Time) has a section of page where people are invited to share stories of early life as fat kids entitled “I was a fat kid…this is my story.”

Oake says:

The goal of this site is simple…to share and to learn. Everyone has had a different set of life experiences…some great and some horrific. If you have no memories of being a fat child that were bad, then, by all means, share a happy story from your childhood. With any luck this site won’t turn into a gripe session, but rather an open, sharing diary about life as a fat child in our society.

The stories are heartrending. I’ve visited the page a few times to read them in small doses. Some of those who share their experiences have managed to fight through childhood pain to build rewarding lives. Others have reached adulthood and still blame themselves with anguish that has not diminished. For some reason the saddest to me were those who grew up being tormented for being fat and now see their children facing the same pain. Parents of fat children are often blamed and targeted for having “let their kids get that way.” Whether or not they were fat kids themselves, parents desperately wish to give their children a better experience. We’ve blogged about this in March, 2012 (including some great resources) here

There are no easy answers to healing a world view that rewards bullying of fat children. Calling out bullies wherever they flourish–including on network television–and naming their actions as damaging is an important part of the remedy. Two things I did were small, but I hope helpful: signing the petition against The Biggest Loser’s targeting of fat kids and contributing to the crowdsourced funding for Rebecca Jane Weinstein’s book (link above). One day and one small action at a time, we can let fat children who suffer know that some adults realize that the bullies are wrong and we are fighting every day to make it better.