My Lady Lawyer Show: Drop Dead Diva
Drop Dead Diva is a Lifetime channel show that combines a lawyer work place comedy with a mild sprinkling of fantasy and a fat-positive, female-positive perspective. I enjoyed the beginning of its first season, then lost track of it, so I mainlined the second half of the first season in preparation for last Sunday's season two premiere.
Things I like about Drop Dead Diva:
- The protagonist (Deb!Jane) is fat and beautiful and dresses well.
- Her assistant (Terri) is heavy and pretty and dresses colorfully.
- Her nemesis (Kim) is skinny, but the source of their disdain is that her nemesis is cutthroat and unpleasant and she sees Jane as a threat to her advancement.
- Female characters sometimes use feminine wiles to advance their agenda, but that's not the weapon of choice for them.
- There is a fantastic element: the premise is that Deb, a vapid fashion model, was killed, contrived to return to Earth, and reincarnated in the body of Jane, a smart fat lawyer. Deb has access to Jane's semantic and procedural memory, but not her episodic memory. Deb has a guardian angel named Fred. Also, there are whacky dance numbers and set pieces, but they are literal dream sequences.
- When Deb!Jane and Kim (the nemesis) were forced to work together, they did a very good job.
- Deb!Jane's weight is not the source of many of her problems, although it is the source of some of them.
- Deb was not mean or bad, just unthinking.
Things not so awesome about Drop Dead Diva:
- The legal and courtroom shenanigans sometimes border on an additional fantasy element.
- Deb!Jane's continued mooning over Deb's fiance, Grayson. This is not done unrealistically or, I think, in a way that humiliates either character, it's just tiresome to me.
- The question of what happened to Jane when she died is never addressed. I suspect we are meant to assume that she went to Heaven (she was a doer of good works; she died/left her body because she took a bullet intended for her boss.)
- Stacy (Deb's best friend) vacillates between fully realized character and dumb blonde stereotype.
I like this show and recommend it. It's not brilliant television, but it's a show about women that's not about kids or husbands, it has a sense of humor about itself, and I have a lot of fun watching it.
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