I'm getting tired of the accusation that the portrayal of the main female characters in 30 Rock and Glee don't work because the actresses playing them are, in fact, extremely pretty.
Tina Fey's character is frumpy because of the way she carries herself: eating vast quantities of junk food, terrible posture etc. Liz Lemon is someone who is pretty (for starters, she dated a guy played by Jon Hamm whose claim to fame was that he was shallow, dumb and attractive) but typically takes very poor care of herself. I’m sorry, but I don’t care who you are – if you do a commercial for a sex line where you’re wearing terrible clothes, have horrible lipstick on your teeth, and creepily eat pizza – you’re gonna look awful. The joke, at least to me, isn’t that Lemon is a horribly disfigured skank (I’d take issue with that, especially the use of the work skank); it’s that she’s completely disheveled.
Lea Michelle's Rachel is grating in that special musical-theater way (I say this as a recovering orchestra dork). Her personality and apparel are by far the most frequent targets for insults. The times I can recall her looks being called into question all stem from her low social standing. I think it is a case of the popular kids seeking to cruelly reinforce the social order rather than the creators of the show asking the viewers to pretend that Lea Michelle is plain. But maybe that’s because I don’t see how that’s even possible.
I've thought about this quite a bit, and I wanted to lay out a couple of reasons I think the argument he's making doesn't work. I realize this may seem like I'm beating a dead horse, but I actually think the emergence of this line of argument is a significant development. So I'm going to go there.
1. Tina Fey's character isn't actually frumpy or ugly. She may wear jeans on a fairly regular basis, and sweatshirts when she's ill, but when she's in the office, she also wears well-tailored dresses and skirts just as often. She's got decent, up-to-date accessories. Her clothes fit, and generally highlight the best parts of her body. Her hair isn't always always Clairol-commercial perfect, but it generally looks pretty good. Other than the sex-line commercial, in which she did look unattractive and poorly put-together, there isn't a clear impact to Liz taking bad care of herself. She doesn't have visible acne from eating badly. She's certainly not overweight, even though she rarely exercises. When Jack guesses her weight accurately in the first episode, it's something like 117 pounds, which is, uh, very skinny. She might get lettuce in her hair, but that's pretty much the only effect her eating has on her.
I do think it's possible to make good jokes out of bad health habits. In the Ocean's 11 franchise, Brad Pitt's character is constantly eating some sort of horrible junk food. But the movies don't need to linger on it. Instead, the juxtaposition of a gorgeous guy in a beautifully-cut suit with unnaturally yellow nacho cheese is enough of a gag. The harping on Liz's habits seems gender-specific to me, to have a specific moral tone, because it sure isn't impacting her appearance. Tina Fey has talked in real life about the intense discipline she imposed on herself under to lose a lot of weight: the jokes about Liz's habits seem like retroactive judgement upon her real-life self, a means of psychological reinforcement, rather than an effective means of humor.
The show consistently pretends that Liz is physically unattractive (in addition to joking about her weird personality). But only the personality jokes are plausible, or frankly, interesting. They're the ones that are simultaneously believable, and that promise character growth, which the show seems to have basically given up on, despite nods in that direction earlier in the series.
Which leads me to:
2. Ugly jokes are lazy. Personality exploration is not. Folks may not "see how that’s even possible" that anyone could believe Lea Michele is ugly. But then it's not particularly clear why the show's creators use those kinds of jokes, even though they do. In earlier teen movies, which focus more on class, outcasts get made fun of because they have bad clothes, out of poverty or choice, or they drive the wrong cars, or listen to music that expresses feelings the dominant characters can't relate to, or are into art rather than football. Movies and television can plumb the psychological roots of all of those things: why a character chooses to dress poorly even though she could dress more conventionally, how a character copes with poverty, what emotions their interests reflect. In other words, you can take those things pretty far. But you can't go much of anyplace with the looks someone's born with. In Glee, Rachel's personality provides plenty of targets for insults and for growth. So why go there with her looks at all, when such insults are both implausible and totally non-clever?
3. When it comes to looks in Hollywood, moving the ball matters. Given how narrow the window of what women can look like in movies and on television is already, repeated jokes about how beautiful women are actually hideous, even if they aren't plausible, are actively harmful to the important cause of diversifying what actors and actresses look like. Those repeated jokes sink in. They have an impact. Especially when the women in question are very good-looking instead of gorgeous, cute instead of outright bombshells. If we convey the impression, even facetiously, that only women who are clones of Angelina Jolie belong on our screens, we run the risk of making what appears there even more repetitive and monotone than it already is.