Boston Legal Fatties—Why Do We Not Dare be Like Them?

Boston Legal Fatties—Why Do We Not Dare be Like Them? by Roxanne McDonald

Why don’t we dare brave the seldom-visited territory where we are proud of our corpulence?

Do women dare take a chance and own with overt pride their sizeable girths, their Rubenesque thighs, their rotund derrieres? No, save the occasional Carrie Otis or Anna Nicole Smith (both of whom were not popular fatties, really, but “plus-sized,” rather).

Well, men dare—they honor their size; they boast and joke about it; they use it to take up space; and they make more of it.

On Boston Legal, for example, in the “Fat Burner” episode dealing with Denny Crane running a human fat as

alternative fuel business, Crane gets sued, Shore defends him, Crane makes up some smug stories, and they win. That evening, as they always do, the two best friends have their nightly cigars and drinks. Alan asks Denny why we don’t use alternative sources of energy. Denny shoots down the possibility that that the oil companies killed the electric car and other-fueled vehicles. Alan asks Denny what he thinks the best answer is, then. Denny points to his own fat gut, then points out how Alan is getting a few “ripples” of his own….
In response, Alan doesn’t get insulted or try to hide one fleshy pillow behind another of foam and cloth (the way you see actresses doing on set–for example, the way Julia Louis Dreyfus does on “Seinfeld” or as Leah Remini does on “King of Queens”). Instead, he suggests the two go for a big steak, baked potatoes, etc..

This scene is of course a play on Denny’s having been taken to court for owning/operating a human waste company which sells the fat to alternative fuel sources; and therefore, they reason, their adding to their own obesity is only “doing good” for the planet.

This is also poking fun at how the rare fat TV characters who are not on a sit-com are depicted as successful attorneys despite their corpulence.

And implicitly, this speaks to how very few fat actresses/characters are as successful. Let’s see, besides comediennes, there are only a countable few: Kamryn Manheim, Kathy Nijimy (before she lost weight), and Two and a Half Men’s Conchata Ferrell—who has won several prestigious awards and has a lead part on 2 ½ Men but who is on a comedy and is in the role of a housekeeper, not a big successful business person or lawyer or whathaveyou.

Go back in time and place to when and where absurdly long nails were a sign of status (signifying a man well off enough not to have to work, for instance), to when fat was revered for kings and princes, or to when fat was understood to be acceptable on men but never on women…. Now come back to today: what has changed, really?

And besides Fat is Beautiful coalitions and clubs, fat is still a man’s bragging right, while it is not for a woman. Look, specifically, if you wish, to the same Boston Legal show for an example: Delta Burke is on Boston Legal now (playing the part of Denny’s on-again off-again ex). On her first long-running series, Designing Women, she had to battle weight, weight issues, and weighty restrictions. On Boston Legal, not only has nothing come up about her weight as an issue for her as an actress, but you don’t see any scripting showcasing her size or aggrandizing her body image, etc..

How absurd that fat looks fine on men.
How silly that fat adds to the success of half the population—even if it is for men like James Spader/Allan Shore and William Shatner/Denny Crane..who are both exquisite features that Boston Legal could not be as great without but who were also both hotties in their pre-Boston Legal days…until they added fifty-plus pounds a piece.
How pitifully ridiculous that skinny to the bone is a more acceptable goal for the female of the species (and especially the female actor), when in fact fat has made her able to survive, reproduce, and give birth over a zillion years of evolutionary imperative that encouraged the fat for survival of all of humankind.

Time to re-think fat and fabulous fat stars.

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