Nikki Bloom's New Huge Hit!

By: Brook
Somehow I happen to stumble across a new show by ABC Family called Huge starring Nikki Bloom (Hairspray), and I was hooked after only about ten minutes. The show is based on the book "Huge" by Sasha Paley, which I have now stacked on the top of my ever growing reading pile. The show centers around a group of overweight teens who are attending 'fat camp' for the summer and explores everything from feminism, body image and media representations, bulimia, thinspiration vs. fatspiration, homosexuality, gender identity, fat phobia, and of course....endless amounts of hormone driven teenage love and angst.

Forget your typical teenage drama that pegs girls against each other with the good v. bad (better known as the virgin v. slut) labels, there seems to be no villain/good guy dichotomy going on here. Which is more than refreshing compared to the rest of the ABC Family prime time lineup. From Pretty Little Liars (whose tag-line is: 'never trust a pretty girl...with an ugly secret') to Secret Life of the American Teenager's blatantly mixed messages about teenage relationships, sexuality and pregnancy played out by 'bad girl' Adrian vs. 'good girl' Amy. Huge does something much more poignant and subversive by not only gaining us over with a loveable and relatable cast but also by taking moments to criticize and mock media representations of fat/fat phobia (as shown when the kids are seen watching a reality tv show called Love Handles, a play on Fox's More to Love).

At the center of the show is rebellious Willamina Rader, an unapologetic feminist gal (as stated sarcastically in episode two as: 'an angry feminist') who is outspoken, calls her fat her b-f-f and has set a goal of being the only person to leave fat camp having gained weight. She insists on being called Will and proudly wears boy's clothes--a blur to gender roles everywhere that becomes a recurring theme addressed through this sharp but lovable character. Her camp bunk, decorated with magazine cut outs of Rubenesque women as her 'fatspiration' and a collage of body parts that spells 'stop body fascism', sits directly under her antitheses' bunk: the shy, cutesy Amber (Hayley Hasselhoff...yes that's right: Hasselhoff) and her collage of 'thinspiration' sprinkled about her own bunk. Amber, an ultra feminine platinum blond pegged as the skinniest of all the campers, is the shy, self sacrificing modest type that can't even tell her crush that he's been calling her by the wrong name for weeks. The two (along with about six other characters that sit at the center of the show) are hard not to love, despite their obvious differences.

Although some of the issues it brings to the screen are sort of introduced without much of a dissection (such as a girl on her way to becoming bulimic getting expelled from camp, a codependent camper with severe separation anxiety from her overweight parents and the camp fitness instructor's outright opinions on not letting her uterus 'control her'), I don't think lingering on them would make the show any more powerful than it already is. The fact that it is getting addressed in this context and that it's being represented in a show in an honest and compelling way is simply ground breaking. The cast is pretty diverse for a situation comedy, and (to me) more accurately exposes the secret life of the American teenager--with honesty, compassion and vulnerability. Coming of age and coming to terms....I can't wait for more!

Here's the trailer from ABC Family:

Video Clip: The girls walk through the pool area and say: It's so different walking around in bathing suits here. It's like no big thing.