TV Needs More People Like Hurley

David and I have just started watching Lost, from the beginning, on DVD from the library. I like it fine. But what I like best about it is Hurley, the fat guy. Why?

Because Hurley is a smart guy. He is not portrayed as a glutton--in fact, when another character assumes he has been hoarding food and comes to him to ask for some, Hurley takes him down a peg with a kind of tired dignity that shows he's dealt with this kind of bs before and he's just not gonna get worked up about it anymore. When there's work to be done (digging somebody out of a collapsed cave, hauling heavy shit around) Hurley gets in there and does it.

He's portrayed as a decent guy who treats others well. He's the one who figures out that the stranded people need something more to bring them together than the endless round of survival and try-to-get-rescued activities.

The show treats Hurley respectfully even when others don't--when another character calls him "Lardo," it's just his selected insult for Hurley; he has a different one for anybody else who crosses his path.

Hurley is a fat guy who never once says anything denigrating about himself; when he tells Charlie he's taken in a notch on his belt, it's a statement of fact, not a "one good thing about being stranded on an island and not being able to get Ben & Jerry's, ha ha" joke of the kind we hear all too often from women with, say, a stomach bug.

I've heard Hurley called the show's comic relief. And he is. But unlike most fat characters on TV, he's not the comic relief because the show is making fun of him, or he is making fun of himself. He's the comic relief because he has a sense of humor.

This shouldn't be revolutionary. There are plenty of fat people in the world who are healthy and hard-working; who like themselves despite all the messages they get telling them they shouldn't; who have brains and compassion and decent relationships. But they don't show up on TV or in the movies. On TV, they show up on The Biggest Loser, or on NCIS as a woman whose flirtation with a main character can't be anything but a joke, or on name-your-medical-drama as patients who are psychotic or eating themselves to death.

I am happy to add Lost to my very short list of movies and TV shows with positive portrayals of fat people (even if the show otherwise makes no effort to show the diversity of body size and shapes that 40 people randomly put together on a plane would exhibit). We're maybe nine episodes in, and so far Hurley and the show's treatment of him is the highlight for me. It is so refreshing to see a member of my tribe being treated like a human being on TV.