Kirstie may be 180 and losing, but she's 54 and gaining

BOSTON — You have to admit that a show named "Fat Actress" is a headline writer's dream. The Showtime docu-comedy that premiered Monday was heralded with enough puns to fill the all-you-can-eat buffet at the copy desk.

There were the headlines announcing that Kirstie Alley "throws her weight around" and that "girth turns to mirth" and that the show was "worth the weight," and you get the idea. The idea being that Alley, former babe of "Cheers" fame, was going to take on and send up Hollywood, the land where "fat actress" is an oxymoron.

It's not exactly a news bulletin that the deadliest sin in Hollywood is gluttony and the greatest moral flaw is cellulite. Remember the classic line about the three ages of women in Hollywood: Babe, District Attorney and "Driving Miss Daisy"? There are only two weights: skeletal Babe and unemployable Blubber.

When Gwyneth Paltrow pulled on a fat suit for "Shallow Hal," she was considered braver than The Rock as his own stuntman. When Renee Zellweger gained 20 pounds for "Bridget Jones' Diary," she got as many gasps as a method actor taking heroin for "Trainspotting."

Indeed back when Alley herself tried out for "Fatal Attraction," at 5-feet-8 and 125 pounds, she was told to lose weight. When she topped 200 pounds, the auditions stopped.

The delicious part of "Fat Actress" is her revenge on the fatparazzi. The tabloids had stalked her, chronicling her weight and making her the big butt of the joke. Then she decided to be the jokester. When no one bought the pitch, Alley sent the network president two boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts with a note that said, "Maybe you're not fat enough to get it. Have a doughnut."

He bit.

This ribald and irresistible show is more than a case study in the double standard of fat. It's also a study in the cultural and personal ambivalence of a woman who is both brazen and vulnerable, sassy and self-loathing, and trapped between the desire to accept her weight and lose it.

But more than anything else, "Fat Actress" puts a star's body at the center of the plot. And that's where we are these days.

On Broadway we had a play about a doomed relationship named "Fat Pig." Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues," turned her sights to the bad belly in "The Good Body."