Eating disorders, the comedy

New York —  When we first meet the character of Sam, he’s staring down at his breakfast of half a grapefruit and yogurt with a familiar look of dissatisfaction. In disgust, he chucks it in the garbage -- then begins to root around in the trash. Suddenly, an ordinary morning ritual takes on a disturbing cast as Sam pulls out a soggy, misshapen piece of chocolate cake coated with white flakes of detergent. Undeterred, he eats around the soap, smearing icing over his face in the process.

Such is the state of affairs in “Starved,” a new show premiering at 10 p.m. Thursday on FX that takes on the unsavory subject of eating disorders with unrepentant, wince-inducing candor. The story of four friends in New York struggling with their relationships with food -- and with the people in their lives -- offers an unsentimental look at our obsessions with body image.

Oh, and it’s a sitcom.

Rooted in the type of gallows humor adopted by many addicts, “Starved” is the creation of independent filmmaker and actor Eric Schaeffer, who produced and starred in 1996’s “If Lucy Fell” with Sarah Jessica Parker and Ben Stiller. To play Sam, a neurotic commodities broker, Schaeffer mined his own life for bitingly funny examples of how people contort their eating habits.

FX selected “Starved” to kick off its new one-hour block of comedy, the basic cable network’s first significant foray into the genre. The uncomfortable subject matter meshes neatly with the channel’s reputation for tackling provocative subjects in its original dramas: “Nip/Tuck” probes the corrosive effects of narcissism in America’s beauty culture, “The Shield” looks at the raw realities of police work and “Rescue Me” examines the lingering effects of Sept. 11 on a New York City fire squad. This month, the network began airing “Over There,” a topical Steven Bochco drama about a U.S. Army unit in Iraq.

But a comedy about eating disorders? Network officials didn’t even hesitate.

“We really want to be on the cutting edge of television,” said John Landgraf, president of FX Networks. “This is a richly complicated and richly emotional arena that had never been explored in depth before.

“I don’t know how many people have eating disorders, but if you talk about people who have issues with food, it’s a huge, huge issue in America. The notion of delving into this world in a way that was darkly funny but honest at the same time was interesting to me.”

The single-camera show is suffused with the feel of a low-budget indie film, with no soundstage or laugh track. The first six episodes were taped in New York this past spring in a hectic, 18-day production schedule.

“I think part of the reason that people have been bemoaning the death of the sitcom is because you can see the jokes coming from a mile away,” said executive producer Dan Pasternack. “The comedy that I love tends to cut close to the bone. There’s certainly something very freeing in being able to laugh about something when there’s a real significant human element to it.”

“Starved” is already generating controversy (see accompanying story). The idea of treating a potentially deadly illness with humor rankles prevention and support groups, which are launching efforts to persuade the network not to air the program. People recovering from eating disorders have posted angry messages on the FX website, urging viewers to boycott the show.

The show may also be a hard sell with food and beverage manufacturers, who spent $429 million on cable television advertising last year, according to the trade magazine Advertising Age.

“It might not be at the top of the list for a food advertiser,” said John Rash, senior vice president at the Minneapolis-based media firm Campbell Mithun.

And it remains to be seen whether audiences will tune in to a show that unhesitatingly depicts often-disturbing measures -- such as repeated colonics -- that the characters take to avoid weight gain.

Schaeffer, who is also the show’s executive producer, director and writer, dismisses criticism that “Starved” pokes fun at eating disorders.

“Comedy always comes out of very real, honest situations,” he said this past spring in a musty room at City Hall, where the cast was taping a scene for the fifth episode. “It only gets exploitative if it’s something you don’t identify with, something that’s not real. So as long as I stay on the side of truthful humanity, there’s no problem.”

Cake under lock and key

For Schaeffer, the truthfulness of “Starved” is built on personal experience. He sifted through his life for anecdotes as he wrote the scripts, including his weakness for chocolate desserts. He too has attempted to avoid eating cake by throwing it in the garbage.

In the show, Sam goes slightly further, obsessively buying chocolate cakes from the newsstand in front of his apartment and making his secretary lock them in her drawer while he is at work. At night, he sprinkles them with detergent to keep himself from eating them -- only to fish them out of the garbage in the morning.

“Eating-wise, Sam is 90% like me,” said Schaeffer, a lean 43-year-old who said he goes through long periods of starving himself, followed by an inevitable bout of binging. “I certainly have anorexic thinking. My friends would laugh at me, saying I’m in denial that I don’t just say I’m anorexic.”

The actors playing the other three lead roles -- Laura Benanti as Billie, an aspiring singer recovering from anorexia and bulimia; Sterling K. Brown as Adam, a bulimic cop; and Del Pentecost as Dan, an overweight writer -- bring their own battles with food to their characters, a fact the producers discovered only after casting them. (By making three of the four main characters men, Schaeffer upends the notion that eating disorders affect only women.)

“It’s still a struggle for me every day to say, ‘I deserve to eat. I deserve to take up space. I’m a good person,’ ” said Benanti, who describes herself as a recovering anorexic.

A Broadway veteran, she said she all but stopped eating while performing in “Swing!” several years ago, trying to compete with the sleek figures of the dancers around her. She lost 30 pounds before her mother jolted her by saying, “I’m scared you’re going to die.”

Yet “other people in the industry were telling me how great I looked,” she said.

Benanti believes it is no coincidence that the actors in “Starved” all have eating problems.

“There’s a huge elephant in the entertainment industry, and that is food,” she said. “But the truth is scary, and most people don’t like to hear it. I think everyone would prefer that women would chug along at 90 pounds, pretending that they’re fine.”

Still, the show’s producers say they have no high-minded aims to educate the public about eating disorders.

“We’re not on a soapbox about the subject matter,” Pasternack said. “Primarily, we want to do a great, funny show that people enjoy. But because of the subject matter we’ve chosen, it’s very important that people understand our intent.”

Schaeffer and Pasternack developed the show for FX when they learned the network was seeking to expand its brand of edgy entertainment into comedy. As recovering alcohol and drug addicts, they were interested in doing a program about addiction but did not want the focus to be too narrow.

“At that time, ‘Super Size Me’ was out, and the cover of almost every magazine had some kind of formerly fat celebrity saying, ‘I had gastric bypass and I’m on the South Beach diet,’ ” Pasternack said. “It just seemed like it was in the air.”

FX snapped up “Starved” as one of the four comedy pilots it produced last year. This past spring, network officials picked the show and another series, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” -- the story of four self-involved friends running an Irish pub -- to establish its comedy beachhead. The only other scripted comedy series that ran on the channel, “Lucky” -- a dark sitcom about a former poker champion -- aired briefly in spring 2003.

“I hope this works, because I’m excited about the show but also about the vitality and originality we can bring to the comedy genre,” Landgraf said. “I think one of the hallmarks of our shows is that they plumb a depth of emotional reality more than what other advertiser-supported networks do.”

While “Starved” delves into the dysfunction surrounding eating disorders, the program is more broadly a study of human relationships. Sam pushes away every woman he becomes involved with. Billie struggles to sort out her sexuality and cope with an alcoholic father. Dan can’t provide his wife the intimacy she seeks. Adam is mired in loneliness.

“Eating is sort of the fifth character,” Schaeffer said. “I wanted to make a show that people would identify with as human beings first.”

Challenging myths

The series shows no squeamishness about taking on revered aspects of the recovery process, including 12-step programs. The characters all seek solace at Belt Tighteners, a sadistic support group at which members shout, “It’s not OK!” after individual confessions.

Still, for all of their efforts to avoid making what Pasternack calls an “after-school special,” “Starved” challenges some of the myths about eating disorders, including the notion that they primarily plague young women.

Adam, the bulimic NYPD officer, probably does the most to shatter stereotypes. Despite his buff physique, he is plagued with insecurity about his body and spends nights alone studying himself in front of the mirror. His obsession spills over into his job. At one point, he pulls over a bicycling Chinese food deliveryman for running a red light and forces him to hand over an order of moo shu pork to get out of a ticket. He gobbles it down, sitting in his police car -- and then uses his nightstick to make himself throw up.

When his supervisors finally get wind of his problem, his captain sneers: “You have a little girly eating disorder problem?”

Brown, who plays Adam, said when he first told his mother about the character he was playing, she responded, “I wouldn’t think someone would cast you as bulimic.”

In fact, Brown said that he constantly wrestles with his weight. As a child, he was heavyset, shedding pounds once he began playing sports. But he is haunted by the “heavyset kid mentality,” a complex he said that has only been exacerbated by being on camera.

When he had to do a scene for “Starved” that required him to take off his shirt, Brown said he was so anxious that he first ran seven miles and did 30 minutes of push-ups. “Then I was like, ‘If I eat, I’ll put it all back on,’ ” he said. “So I had a bag of raw spinach and drank some tea.”

Isn’t it ironic that he went to such measures for a show about eating disorders?

Brown smiled wryly. “Isn’t it, though?”