Go Figure

In AMC’s Dietland, women pursue violent extremes to take control of their lives

- Anna Menta

DIETLAND WANTS TO TEACH YOU how to say the word fat. The new dark comedy from AMC, based on Sarai Walker’s 2015 best-seller of the same name, features a character, Plum Kettle, who is not “heavyset,” “chubby” or “curvy.” She’s fat.

Joy Nash, the actor who plays Plum, weighs 293 pounds. She’s fine with fat. In fact, she’ll have a problem if you don’t use the word. “It’s a bit of a litmus test,” says Nash. “You only need a euphemism when the truth is so terrible you can’t talk about it. There’s nothing wrong with being fat.”

Dietland is not, in other words, going to be like the first season of This Is Us, which lost points with many in the fat community after Chrissy Metz, its Emmy-winning star, signed a contract with NBC to lose weight along with her character.

Plum might begin the series loathing herself and desperately yearning for weight loss surgery, but she soon joins a feminist empowerment group that espouses turning self-hatred outward. At the same time, a terrorist group, called Jennifer, begins abducting, torturing and killing rapists who got away with it—in one case, dropping a man out of a plane, onto the streets of New York City. Walker’s novel, which is about “women’s unleashed anger and rage,” is not something the author thinks viewers see enough of on TV. “I’m talking Thelma & Louise,” she says. “Have young people even seen that movie?”