This Is Us is proof that TV is terrible at portraying overweight people

Vulture

Comedian Guy Branum, host of truTV's Talk Show the Game Show, tackles the problematic portrayal of overweight people on TV and in pop-culture in his new memoir, My Life As a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture. As he points out, Chrissy Metz's character Kate can't be seen as content with her life unless she's losing weight. "Kate, the fat sister on NBC’s This Is Us, is a fictionalized version of a Biggest Loser competitor," Branum writes. "She has no qualities. She’s thirty-seven years old and is wholly devoid of skills or passions other than kind of liking singing. While one of her brothers earned a graduate degree and the other bounced between acting jobs, Kate did nothing of note or merit. We can assume her time was spent romancing wheels of Camembert and being too scared to talk to a boy because she knows she’s too fat to be loved. Have any of these people met a fat girl? A real Kate, in the real world, would be awesome. She’d have tons of gay friends and go to drag bingo a lot. She’d have learned to be fearless with fashion, because people are going to judge her anyway. She’d have a joke to make when she’s too sweaty. She’d have broken a chair before, and she’d know what to do when it happens the second time. Chrissy Metz gives great soul to the character, but as she’s written, Kate is a cul-de-sac of a human being who has tasted nothing of the world except cheesy fries. That ain’t any of the fat bitches I know. The reason the writers of This Is Us cannot imagine Kate doing anything valuable is because her existence as a fat person means she is doing things that are unvaluable. If Kate is fat, she cannot have been journeying toward unfatness with all of her power ... Happiness and success are there for Kate, but only in her future, only as part of her narrative of losing fat, and only if she doesn’t fail. And we need fat people to fail. We need them to be so dumb and lacking in willpower that said salvation is never actually achieved. We need to know that their immorality is inherent so we can believe our own thin morality is inherent." (Disclosure: Guy Branum and I worked on our college newspaper at the same time when the Secret Service visited him, but we barely knew each other then and don't know each other now.)