Series five of Desperate Housewives starts five years in the future (that's next Wednesday on Channel 4 to you and me). Tune in and you'll notice that Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) has undergone a bedraggled-mom makeover. Her face is unpainted, weary pins spike out from a dreary smock-housecoat and two chubby daughters chafe her ankles. Only half way through episode one did it occur to me that by drabbing-down Gaby, they're trying to impart something much more chilling: she got fat. "I had two children," she snaps at pals. "For what? Breakfast?" gnashes Edie.
Patiently, I waited for a moment when her smock snuggled up to her body so I could scan Longoria for lard. Nothing. The truth, it seems, is that she hasn't gained a gram. She's just acting fat. To throw you off, every now and then she sticks out her tummy in a way that makes this little woman look like a bent ruler. But at no point do you think she needs to cut back on the Twinkies.
It's unfortunate that Desperate Housewives didn't go the whole hog with Gaby because TV history is stuffed with examples of how bloating out a character can create dramatic tension and/or laughs. Here are my all-time top five small-screen big-ups:
Friends
The ones where Monica's a fat teen. Courtney Cox would regularly tuck her sinewy self into a prosthetic lard-arse and slap on some jowls for a flashback. There's also that fat-Joey-in-the-future episode, and we mustn't forget how Chandler Bing oscillated between fat and thin. His ongoing inflation/deflation was, of course, dictated by Matthew Perry's real-life battle to evict those two hamsters from his cheeks.
Frasier
When Jane Leeves got pregnant - just as Niles and Daphne were getting it on - the writers deftly penned Daphne a weighty storyline. Wardrobe ordered a fat suit and, lo, her pregnancy was veiled in foam. Come birth time, Daphne was dispatched to a fat-farm. This wasn't so much a lard-led comic masterpiece as a clever way to integrate pesky reality into sitcom fiction.
Battlestar Galactica
Newly married but rejected by his true love and grudgingly made captain of a ship, Lee "Apollo" Adama loses sight of himself. The physical manifestation of his emotional crisis? Moobs, blubber-flanks and a big bottom. Meanwhile, almost everyone else is down on Cylon-ruled New Caprica fighting and dying. Apollo's journey from hard-body to space-whale serves as a neat metaphor for the rot that's creeping through the colonial fleet.
Mad Men
Peggy - a secretary who in series one looks set to throw off her 1960s lady-shackles and make it as a copywriter in the male-dominated advertising industry - slowly gathers heft after an affair with a married colleague. But at the end of the series we learn the real reason for her much-mocked bulk: a foetus. This was fatting-up cleverly spun into a nifty plot-twist.
30 Rock
Technically, it's cheating to include a sight-unseen example in my top five, but this one sounds too good to ignore. As series two starts you'll notice that Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) has got chunky. Jenna, we learn, put on 18 kg when she starred in Mystic Pizza: The Musical and had to eat four slices per show. Arf. Watch and learn, Longoria.
