‘Dietland’ EP is proud to share her ‘empathy propaganda’
“I don’t hate myself. The world hates me. For being like this. People look at me like I have the plague. They act like I’m a stain.”
So says Alicia Kettle (Joy Nash) in the third episode of AMC’s subversive new drama “Dietland.” Alicia, nicknamed Plum, makes this statement of exasperation and affirmation to her mother (Debra Monk) and her best friend (Tramell Tillman). A plus-sized woman out of place in a zero-sized culture, she’s tried every weight reduction plan. She’s taken anti-depressants. She’s done everything to make the world forget she’s there.
And now she’s about to give the world the middle finger.
“Dietland” is a show with a subversive agenda. “It’s absolutely empathy propaganda,” says executive producer Marti Noxon, a veteran of several high-profile series (“Mad Men,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) who developed the show from Sarai Walker’s popular 2015 novel. “People who don’t feel empowered have a lot less security about who they are. They’re constantly trying to please the eye of the beholder.”
Noxon’s propaganda starts at the most insidious breeding ground of lies about female body image: the American fashion magazine. An art history major in college, Plum handles the letters to the editor page for Daisy Chain magazine, writing answers for the diva at the top of the masthead: Kitty Montgomery (Julianna Margulies, severe in a dark-red wig). Plum, of course, could do much more, but Kitty keeps Plum in the background. Others in the magazine’s employ, namely eccentric beauty closet administrator Julia (Tamara Tunie), have plans for Plum, though. Julia wants her help in staging a mutiny against Austin Media, the company that makes a fortune off such dreck.
Nash, 37, campaigned hard for the role of Plum, dropping off her own head shot at the casting director’s office. “I’ve never read a character like this,” she says. “A fat girl who goes on a journey, who’s complicated, who makes some mistakes. The goal isn’t a physical transformation.”
She borrowed Walker’s novel from the public library. “Each time I got a call back I’d check it out again,” she says. “Finally I stole the book once I got the part.”
Come again: you stole a book from a public library?
“I bought one to replace it,” Nash says reassuringly.
As a resident of LA, the country’s most body-conscious city, Nash has made her dimensions work for her. “I worked as a fit model for a long, long time. Not in print but as a live mannequin for plus-size designers,” she says. “And it really divorces who I am from my body when I’m standing there and they’re deciding whether to hire you and they say, ‘She has a belly. So that’s good.’ And they hire me because of my belly. I can’t hate it. It got me a job where I get paid $125 per hour to stand there.”
Noxon, 53, comes to the project having conquered both anorexia and bulimia, a bout which started in her teens and went on into her mid-twenties. “Part of the reason my obsession started was because I was a chubby kid,” she says. “And I had to wear pants called Junior Plenty. There was a line called Junior Plenty at J.C. Penney. And I felt a real kinship with my friends who were fat because I had body dysmorphia. I got very lucky. I found a great doctor. I’d be lying if I said [the recovery] was a straight line.”
As “Dietland” debates the pros and cons of body-image issues, the show launches its most topical plot line. A group of women called The Jennifers is killing men accused of sexual abuse against women and dropping them from the sky.
“I thought the novel was really demanding two kinds of social justice action,” Noxon says. “One is more passive and non-violent. The other is violent action against predators. I was really interested in examining those two extremes. What does it take to make a revolution?”
It takes a girl named Plum.
“Dietland” Series premiere 9 p.m. Monday on AMC