Drop Dead Diva: Premiere

By Lisa Fary

I must be sharing soul-space with a recently deceased sap because I actually enjoyed a show on Lifetime: Television for Women.

Drop Dead Diva presents Deb, a looks-obsessed babe who’s on her way to a Price is Right modeling audition when she dies in a car wreck (which wouldn’t have happened if she were paying attention).  When Deb sits down with afterlife middle management to determine her destination, it turns out she’s a zero-zero: she’s never done a bad deed, but she’s never done a good deed, either. Deb commandeers her afterlife manager’s keyboard and sends herself back to Earth, but it’s not what she expected.

Deb lands back on Earth in the recently vacated body of Jane, a frumpy lawyer who took a bullet to save a co-worker. Since Jane volunteers for Meals on Wheels and does loads of pro bono work, it’s safe to assume that her soul has entered Heaven. Deb operates Jane’s body, which comes complete with Jane’s intelligence, legal knowledge, and food cravings.

Drop Dead Diva doesn’t demonize the pretty size 2 standard or demean women who don’t fit it.  For instance, Deb’s pretty friend Stacy is shallow, but sticks by her and is a good friend. Even before her death, there must have been more to Deb than just pretty. She sticks around the law firm, genuinely doing good deeds, rather than doing the shallow thing: blowing Jane’s money on plastic surgery to get back to the pretty zone.

What we learn about Deb is that she’s smarter than she thinks – even without Jane’s brain. She wasn’t only a beauty and Jane wasn’t only a brain – they were each a bit of both in their own ways.

It would have been very easy for Drop Dead Diva to be irritating as hell. In other hands, it could have become a story of “pretty girl learns that plus-size people are people, too!” or, god forbid, “pretty girl learns that real beauty is on the inside!” Thankfully, Lifetime doesn’t take it there and the result is sweet and charming.

Drop Dead Diva did get all Lifetime on me for a minute, with emotional music and grainy flashbacks of Deb’s good times with her surviving boyfriend, Grayson (who happens to be starting out at Jane’s law firm – awkward scenes ahead, no doubt).  It’s expected – it is Lifetime, after all – but most of the show was witty and far better than expected. It’s on my summer watch list, now.

Drop Dead Diva airs Sundays at 9PM on Lifetime.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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