Fat TV: Sookie from Gilmore Girls

This is my dirtly little secret: I’m a total Gilmore Girls junkie.

It was nothing to be ashamed about in high school, when everyone else I knew was obsessed with Rory and Lorelai’s antics. But now that I’m in college and people mostly watch CSI and West Wing and other Important Television Shows (oxymoron?), I feel a little silly saying how much I still like Gilmore Girls.

One of my big reasons? It has Sookie, played by Melissa McCarthy. If you don’t know Sookie, she’s this short, round little chef, Lorelai’s best friend, and is married to this tall kind of bumbling farmer/gardner, Jackson. What I like so much about how the show’s creators portray Sookie’s character is that she’s a real fat person who is confident in herself and for whom fatness isn’t a source of shame, the butt of jokes or a reason to diet. Sookie loves food, she loves her husband and her child, and when people move in the show around Sookie they revolve around her vibrancy, her style and her … well, coolness. It’s not like the producers are saying, “look, she’s cool even though she’s fat!”, it’s like they’re saying, “look, she’s cool! she’s fat! she’s a little high-strung!” and that’s okay.

So yeah, rock on Sookie. If you’ve never tuned in to Gilmore Girls, it’s worth it just to see a fat person on TV being something other than part of a weight-loss contest or fodder for slimmer comedians.