Pride and Prejudice, Lifetime Channel-Style

Aly (Kaley Cuoco in a fat suit) suffers taunts as an overweight teenager in the movie "To Be Fat Like Me" at 9. (Lifetime Television)

One advantage that alcoholics have over carboholics: They can't necessarily be spotted on sight. They don't carry their "shame" around with them -- one of the incidental realities intelligently addressed in "To Be Fat Like Me," a well-meant if eventually confused movie premiering on Lifetime tonight at 9.

Obviously, the topic of tubbiness is one that both real and fictitious people usually treat with gags and japes, at least on television. Merely choosing to deal with it seriously is to the credit of writer Michelle Lovretta, director Douglas Barr and the innumerable producers. Unfortunately they're all subject to the Lifetime politburo: The moral to the tale must be so obvious, for instance, that no one could miss it. In fact, it's spoken directly into the camera in the final moments of the film.

In addition, all women depicted must be "empowered" to some degree, with no sign of weakness. When, in tonight's film, the teenage heroine's mother cries, she does it off-camera. She literally shuts the door in the viewer's face. That's life -- er, Lifetime.

It takes about 15 minutes to set up the premise, which is based on a New York teenager's real-life adventure, taped and aired by ABC News in 2003. Kaley Cuoco, a very assured and attractive young star, plays a girl named Aly (real teen's name: Ali -- creative license?), who disguises her athletic body and adorable face with padding and prosthetics so that she can live life as a fat person -- and then turn her experiences into a documentary called, surprise surprise, "Fat Like Me."

It wasn't an entirely original gambit even in 2003. A brave journalist friend of mine, as it happens, had the idea years earlier, donned a pillow-filled suit and an artificially inflated face, and turned her ordeal into a touching magazine piece.

Whatever. The things that happen to Fat Aly open Fit Aly's eyes, and even if some of the reactions she gets are predictable -- from the disapproving stares of female body-snobs to cruel ridicule from spiteful guys (one goes "moo" as she passes; another says, "Wide load coming through") -- they're all dramatized with credible credibility and convincing conviction.

Aly's attitudes toward The Fat are not entirely academic. Earlier in life, we learn, her mother (played with nicely shaded subtlety by Caroline Rhea) had emotional problems that led to binge eating, then to diabetes and a heart attack. Aly looks back on this period not with compassion but with bitterness, and the deeper she gets into her documentary, the more hostile she becomes toward poor Mom, eventually lashing out with heartless cruelty.

Meanwhile, Fat Aly makes a friend at summer school of a genuinely obese girl, Ramona, played with unquestionable authority by Melissa Halstrom; she probably gives the most heartfelt performance, if partly by default (Halstrom knows what it is to be overweight as well as Ramona does). When Ramona finds out that Aly befriended her just to capture her responses on video, she throws a fit and stomps off.

You'd think Aly could save the day by coming up with well-chosen words about the project and its potential benefits to fat people -- but writer Lovretta drags the tiff out too long. This tends to make Aly look inarticulate at best. Portraying a character as both smart and stupid isn't necessarily showing complexity; here it seems like inconsistency for the sake of dramatic conflict.

Does it all end happily? Not in the simplistic sense, though at least there are no bloodied dead bodies littering the lawn. Along the way the filmmakers stage some particularly satisfying encounters, as when Aly talks Ramona into going into a store that sells clothes for "normal"-size women instead of a fatties' shop, and then is met with a cold brushoff by a snide salesclerk; Aly lets her have it in no uncertain terms. She even gets the clerk a reprimand from her boss -- the kind of wish-fulfillment scene some of us would love to bring off in real life.

As for the mandated moral, it's considerably more profound than "beauty is only skin deep" or other such platitudes. "To Be Fat Like Me" sometimes pulls back just when it threatens to become truly affecting, but by and large it gets the job done, and Cuoco shows high promise as a beautiful but believable new star -- as long as she lays off the Ho Hos and Oreos, of course.

Kidding. I'm kidding. Honest.