Huge (and other televised fat people)

Okay, to continue today's theme of "stuff we shouldn't share with graduate seminars": One of my guilty pleasures is "documentaries" about people with bizarre medical conditions and/or other physical characteristics that would, in the days of PT Barnum, have landed you in a circus side show. I wrote a paper about it once, so it counts as a legitimate academic interest. This means I've seen at least one episode of most of the "fat people shows."

My favorite is Huge. ABC Family canceled the show and I'm not sure about DVD release, but the episodes are available online. I recommend at least watching the pilot through to the point of Nikki Blonsky's striptease.

The show is kind of wildly uneven, and I hated the adult characters, but the teenage stuff was pretty great, and it certainly has a unique (and I think valuable) perspective on body image. It's set at fat camp, but it's really not about fat camp.

http://abcfamily.go.com/shows/huge

For what I find to be generally thought-provoking, self-proclaimed feminist/fat activist recaps of Huge, try Fatshionista.

And, on the reality TV spectrum, we have Too Fat for 15: Fighting Back, which I think is trying hard not to be as exploitative as a show like The Biggest Loser...but which is not exactly succeeding.

Now the other fat people shows (not Biggest Loser, which I think is intolerably awful):

The supremely boring One Big Happy Family (they actually are a happy family, and consequently make bad television).

You might also consider the dreadful Style series Ruby, or TLC's one-off specials with titles like "The 600-pound Virgin," or one that I think was called "Ton of Love" (couples whose combined weight is very, very high indeed), or the CBS sitcom Mike and Molly (of which I've only seen one episode). There are probably others that I'm forgetting at the moment...