'Dietland': A Feminist Comedy That Hurts

But wait, there’s more than just a bad-boss comedy. Plum , the central heroine of the show, weighs close to 300 pounds. And while she yearns to gastric-bypass her way into a perfect little red dress and fantasizes about her future svelte self (whom she has given the thin-sounding name “Alicia” — the name of Margulies' character in Good Wife), this slender self exists to make the point that Plum is just fine the way she is. The show’s creator, Marti Noxon, 53, made the 2017 Sundance Film Festival hit To the Bone about her own eating disorder, and Nash is a fan of Marilyn Wann’s book Fat! So? Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size. You’d expect a show about a fat female to be a Hollywood makeover fantasy where she gets that red dress, but Dietland is an attack on that whole idea, and on anti-woman acts ranging from catcalls on the street to Harvey Weinstein-like assaults.

It’s sometimes a violent attack. Kitty defends a photographer who abuses women and is accused of rape, but a group of women vigilantes kidnap him and force him to admit his crimes on video. On Dietland, when it’s raining men, the men tend to go splat on the sidewalk. This isn’t quite the feminism Plum had in mind. She’s more in tune with a less violent feminist-crusader character, Verena Baptist (Big Little Lies’ Robin Weigert, 48), who tries to talk her out of surgery. Verena exposed her own family’s successful weight-loss business, and now she’s a crusader using her ill-gotten fortune to atone for the company's anti-woman legacy.

As feminist consciousness is peaking — even triumphing — all over our culture, it’s the ideal moment for a show like Dietland. If viewers can handle a satirical publishing-industry comedy that also is a murderous revenge fantasy, a screed against fat-shaming, and a show full of wild animated fantasy passages and extended hallucinations expressing the heroine’s deepest fears, it could be the Handmaid’s Tale-like success of the season — and proof that the #MeToo movement can spawn a hit.