Feel Good Feminism

Every summer, re-runs and reality television eventually send me running to places like Lifetime, the network specialists in easily consumed moral dramadies. And, honestly, I don’t usually mind. Sometimes I need to be reminded that while totalizing and lasting change is the ultimate goal of feminism, its prerequisite is an individual change in consciousness. Lifetime lets me watch that happen to varying degrees of cheesiness.

And this summer’s Drop Dead Diva was one tasty hunk of cheese. Jane (Brooke Elliot), a plus-sized attorney, is shot and killed (at her office, by the husband of a woman the managing partner is banging—talk about a hazardous work environment). At the same time Deb (Brooke D’Orsay), an aspiring model heading to an audition for The Price is Right, is hit by a fruit truck. Deb arrives in heaven, and is informed that she’s too shallow to warrant heaven or hell. While gatekeeper Fred (Ben Feldman) puzzles over this anomaly (I guess it’s good it doesn’t happen often… right?), Deb hits the “return” button on his computer’s keyboard. She’s returned, but into the newly vacant body of Jane. You see where we’re headed: the gag of making the pretty girl switch places with the fat girl is as old as TV itself, but somehow, set against a backdrop of economic depression, the return to “lookism” takes on a fresher quality than we had any right to expect.

Jane conquers all sorts of social issues: waitresses fired for weight gain (July 19’s “The ‘F’ Word”), wrongful imprisonment (August 16’s “Second Chances”), and starvation plans fraudulently marketed as diets (August 23’s “The Magic Bullet”). And the whole time, Deb is learning what the world is like when you’re not granted immunity from social rules because you’re gorgeous. It’s the kind of show that makes you wish that there really was a way to let people experience discrimination first-hand.

Candace Bushnell, in her newest attempt to prove that vapid materialism is somehow empowerment, 4 Blondes, has a guy that gets laid because he’s rich remark to a prominent editor, “You used to be pretty yourself. Before you got smart.” Drop Dead Diva’s one failure is that it doesn’t touch this either/or dilemma: in fact, it banks on it. Stacy (April Bowlby), Deb’s friend (and the only one who knows that she’s Jane) is routinely stumped by the simplest day-to-day tasks of her career as an unemployed model. Kim (Kate Levering), presented in the show as Jane’s “attractive” counterpart, routinely bests the clearly more capable Jane with her greater feminine wiles. I’m not saying that they have to go Legally Blonde, but some attention to this aspect of “lookism” would be nice, since Lifetime has announced that the show will be back for a second season.