Dietland, review: Amazon's dark comedy has promise – but there are a lot of creases to iron out first
Television is filled with corpses of early episodes: the ones that ardent fans warn newcomers not to watch, because the show hadn’t yet got into its stride (or in the case of the much-loved Parks and Recreation, the whole first series).
Dietland, a dark comedy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer producer Marti Noxon, gets off to a similarly sticky start, but its premise promises to be an interesting one should it manage to iron out the initial creases during its 10-episode run on Amazon Prime Video.
Based on Sarai Walker’s 2015 debut novel, Dietland sees struggling journalist Alicia “Plum” Kettle (Joy Nash) living in dutiful misery, awaiting a stomach stapling surgery. She’s called Plum because she’s “round and succulent, otherwise known as fat” – ironic given that journalism’s only other famous Plum, the author Plum Sykes, is incredibly slim.
Plum obeys even the grimmest unwritten societal rules of being fat. She dresses entirely in black (slimming!), exists in a permanent state of hunger from endless salad, ignores the cat calls of men wanting to take pictures and laugh at her from cars, and attends diet group meetings “for people who are ready to feel good about themselves”, run by a woman with the emotional IQ of a raisin.
Despite being evidently capable, Plum’s low self-esteem has left her ghostwriting a letters page for the perimenopausal editor of a long-running tweens mag called Daisy Chain, Kitty Montgomery, (The Good Wife’s Julianna Margulies, dressed like Paloma Faith put through a bad Instagram filter). Kitty’s readers send in desperate correspondence about self-harm, eating disorders, coercive sex, incest and rape, which Plum tries to answer helpfully, while grappling with Kitty’s refusal to let her pitch ideas for the magazine – exactly how long is compiling a letters page supposed to take?
While visiting Daisy Chain headquarters, Plum is approached by a mysterious girl who tells her to head down to the magazine’s opulent basement beauty cupboard. Its director, Julia (Tamara Tunie) then reveals she is sabotaging Daisy Chain's parent company, Austen Media, from within, and is really working for a pro-body feminist cause to which she tries to recruit Plum.
Add in a hunky detective investigating data leaks at the magazine, and a terrorist group named Jennifer, who are murdering men who have committed violent crimes against women, and it’s all going on in Dietland. In fact, so much is going on, that the lack of cohesive direction or energy is terribly apparent. Watching Margulies’s bizarre Kitty Montgomery made me pine for Ugly Betty’s Wilhelmina Slater, who was magnificently evil, but also at least seemed to know how to run a magazine. Julia the double agent, meanwhile, chews more scenery than Ian McKellen in pantomime.
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For a show aimed at shattering society’s rules around body image, Dietland is filled with bad advice: a doctor tells Plum to reduce her calorific intake to 700 calories a day or he won’t allowed her surgery. Really? And rather than coming off her anti-depressants slowly, Plum simply throws them down the loo – no, no, no.
However, Joy Nash is a real find: utterly charismatic, she creates a nuanced, utterly credible character with the merest furrow of her brow. It's simply that Plum’s very real concerns – how to pay for her spiralling medical costs, where her career is going, whether the hunky detective really fancies her or simply has a kink for fat women – are warped any time she encounters characters that seem to have fallen out of a different show.
Plum is our rock in what, so far, is shaky ground. Dietland’s subject matter makes for timely and important viewing, but there's room for improvement when it comes to the execution.