Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Starved: Cast Photo

Starved aired from August until September 2005 on FX.

Short-lived and rather dark comedy about four members of a New York City eating-disorders group. Sam ( Eric Schaeffer) was a sexually frustrated Wall Street broker who ate chocolate cakes out of the trash; Billie ( Laura Benanti), an anorexic and bisexual would be songwriter; Adam ( Sterling K. Brown), a bulimic NYPD cop who shook down delivery guys for food; and Dan ( Del Pentecost), an overweight writer. There was a good deal of sex talk, as well as food obsessions. Their chant was "Its not OK!"

A Review from The New York Times

The TV Watch
Looking for the Humor in Americans' Struggle to Become Smaller

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: August 4, 2005

There is nothing not funny about eating disorders.

The diet industry rakes in $45 billion a year and one of every three American adults is obese: fat, food and dieting form the new frontier of American folly. We are a nation of problem eaters, and for television to ban comic scrutiny of the malady would be as unrealistic as medieval poets avoiding allusions to the plague.

The trouble with "Starved," a comedy on FX about anorexia and bulimia that begins tonight, is that it's not quite funny enough. The premise is certainly bold: four friends in Brooklyn help one another through doughnut crises and other 21st-century woes. Three of them are men, piercing the myth that only women have eating disorders. Adam (Sterling K. Brown) is a buff, black New York City cop who suffers from bulimia. He trumps up traffic violations against Chinese food delivery men and bullies them into paying him off with moo-shu pork.

"Starved" was created and written by Eric Schaeffer, a writer and actor who drew on his own experiences with eating disorders and addiction to play the lead character, Sam, a weight-obsessed commodities broker who sprinkles detergent on chocolate snack cakes as a deterrent, then devours them anyway straight from the trash. Sam is supposed to be the pivot of the show, and he flounders. His uncontrolled appetite may command sympathy, but his boorish sexual mores are harder to accept. Sam claims to yearn for true love, but he mistreats and debases any woman who responds to him.

FX is not by any means the first network to obsess on the national obsession with obesity and eating. Reality TV dieting is a growth industry, be it shows like NBC's "Biggest Loser," VH1's "Celebrity Fit Club" or Showtime's "Fat Actress," a mock documentary starring Kirstie Alley, who is also the spokeswoman for Jenny Craig. Television, which brackets diet shows with fast food ads, also has reality shows for yo-yo viewers: on Saturday, Oxygen will show "Mo'Nique's Fat Chance," a beauty pageant for plus-size women, with the title host also the spokesmodel for "Just My Size." Pretaped material includes a coach who uses drill sergeant techniques to instill self-esteem. "You're fat and WHAT?" he shouts. "Fat and FABULOUS," they chant in unison.

Tough love is the preferred therapy on "Starved." Sam and his friends belong to "Belt Tighteners," a parody of Weight Watchers: when one of the members confesses a recent lapse, the group chants in unison, "That's not O.K.!"

The four have breakfast almost every day at a nearby coffee shop and bicker about food and sex. Sam has a crush on his friend Billie (Laura Benanti), a bisexual aspiring singer recovering from anorexia and bulimia. But neither she nor the other friends are capable of having a healthy relationship. Adam, the cop, pretends he has a girlfriend but actually eats candlelit steak dinners alone. Dan (Del Pentecost), an obese writer in the group, prefers watching the Dallas Cowboys to making love to his wife.

All four actors have said in interviews that they have personal experience with eating disorders, and the series does provide some insights. There are even a few flashes of clever dialogue and satire. But gallows humor about serious maladies works best when the jokes are unsettlingly smart. "Starved" relies too heavily on sight gags and gross-out farce: Sam's colonics session goes disgustingly awry; Adam makes himself vomit on what he thinks is a pile of garbage but turns out to be a homeless man sleeping under a blanket of trash.

FX, which is home to "Nip/Tuck," "The Shield" and, most recently, "Over There," prides itself on cutting-edge programming, but the network is more sure-footed with drama. FX's other new comedy - back to back with "Starved" - is "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," a series about four former high school friends who run an Irish pub - again, three guys and a girl. "Always" seeks to tweak political correctness, but it too falls flat much of the time. The writing is not witty enough to carry the material, which is not even very original.

In the first episode, a young black man enters the bar at closing time, and the three guys automatically assume he is there to rob or harass them. He turns out to be an acting class friend of Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson). They think he is tough and cool and hire him to bring in new customers; he does, only they are gay men who quickly turn Paddy's Irish Pub into the hot new gay club. Clownish homophobia is hardly a daring new take in comedy - gay jokes weigh down the new movie "Wedding Crashers" as well.

Both "Starved" and "Always," are intent on breaking out of the network sitcom mold, yet end up falling into the conventions of nontraditional television comedy - be it stand-up routines on Comedy Central, or skits on "Mad TV" and "Saturday Night Live" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The heroes of sitcoms are dorky and lovable, so the protagonists of "Starved" and "Always" are dorky and loathsome. Network sitcom scripts are supposed to be politically correct about blacks, gays and women; the cable shows go in unison against the grain.

Sam on "Starved" is a fairly successful bachelor who treats women horribly. The guys on "Always" are losers who can't get dates. In the second episode, Mac (Rob McElhenney) pretends to be an ardent anti-abortion campaigner to seduce a sexy zealot who pickets family planning offices. When she tells Mac she is pregnant, he instantly recommends an abortion. (Turns out she was just testing him.)

Even those scenarios could be funny in the hands of Larry David or Dave Chappelle, but Mr. McElhenney and the rest of the cast are not yet in that league. In an age of limitless cable, irreverence toward sensitive issues is not uncommon. Funny is much harder to find.

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
Starved

B By Gillian Flynn

You'd expect FX, the network behind great button-pushers like Rescue Me and Nip/Tuck, to throw some brilliant firebombs with its new sitcoms. The plan only kinda worked.

Take Starved, which drops provocative lines the way a preening teenage girl might if forced to attend her parents' dinner party: scandalous in a pre-fab, easily dismissable way. Let's gasp, then pass the vichyssoise.

That's not to say Starved isn't occasionally amusing; it's just not as daring as it wants to be. It's Seinfeld lite, overstuffed with wild situations, minus the slyness.

Written, directed, and starring the sometimes charming, sometimes annoying Eric Schaeffer (My Life's in Turnaround), focuses on a Seinfeldian foursome of intellectual, neurotic New Yorkers in an eating-disorder support group: egotistic, anorexic commodities trader Sam (Schaeffer); bulimic/anorexic, bisexual singer Billie (Laura Benanti); bulimic cop Adam (Sterling K. Brown); and overeating novelist Dan (Del Pentecost).

Starved drops tiny, perfect details to paint out its characters' obsessions. Adam arranges his Pop-Tarts in rows like a delicious game of Concentration; Sam weighs himself after peeing to see if he's any lighter. The supporting cast is extremely affable, particularly Tony nominee Benanti, who gives her lines surprising little backspins. (She sells an entire scene with her delivery of the single word ''no.'') But Starved's showy premise is also its downfall. We can laugh guiltlessly at Jerry (or Ross, Will, or Grace) because he's nice-looking and successful. But having a chuckle at a man making himself vomit on the side of the street feels a bit off.

The seesaw writing doesn't help: In a single episode, you can see Sam slapstickily spraying water out of his ass after an ill-fated colonic and Billie pensively hitting the bottle after an ego-wrecking evening with her parents. In the wake of the sad hilarity of The Office, more series are attempting this jagged combination, proudly refusing to telegraph to the audience how we should feel (Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback being one prime, unfunny example). But to pull that off, a series has to be pretty much tonally perfect — and Starved ain't. Schaeffer may be incapable of such fine-tuning — he's too busy trying to offend.

An Article from Medpage Today

FX Network's "Starved" Cooks Up Medical Controversy
By Neil Osterweil, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today
Published: August 04, 2005

NEW YORK, Aug. 4-The FX network's new comedy series Starved attempts to do for eating disorders what M*A*S*H* did for the Korean War: mine humor out of a deadly subject. Action Points

But authorities in eating disorders -- some who have seen the pilot episode -- are worried that the program will make light of serious conditions such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge eating.

"I can't imagine doing this same thing with leukemia or any other serious, potentially life-threatening illness," said Lynn Grefe, CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association, in an interview.

"We know of the millions of people affected in this country by eating disorders. Families are losing their homes and depleting their life savings and their retirement accounts to pay for treatment because insurance rarely pays for treatment as it's necessary. So I don't see anything funny about this."

Grefe, whose organization has called for a boycott of Starved, says that portraying people with anorexia and bulimia comically trivializes the diseases and makes serious disorders sound like lifestyle choices.

According to the NEDA, nearly 10 million American women suffer from anorexia or bulimia as do one million men, and another 25 million people suffer from some type of binge eating disorder.

"The essential features of anorexia nervosa are that the individual refuses to maintain a minimally normal body weight, is intensely afraid of gaining weight, and exhibits a significant disturbance in the perception of the shape or size of his or her body," according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR).

Bulimia nervosa is characterized by binge eating and "inappropriate compensatory methods to prevent weight gain," such as self-induced vomiting, or purging. "In addition, the self-evaluation of individuals with bulimia nervosa is excessively influenced by body shape and weight," according to the DSM-IV-TR criteria. "To qualify for the diagnosis, the binge eating and the inappropriate compensatory behaviors must occur, on average, at least twice a week for three months."

When it comes to eating disorders, images in both the news and entertainment media can have a significant effect.

"There was a study on Fiji; before TV it was actually valued to be somewhat overweight or obese, and after they got TV, a couple of years later people started to develop eating disorders," said Thomas Weigel, M.D., a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who also treats patients at the Klarman Center for Eating Disorders at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.

The NEDA states that four of five 10-year-old children say they are afraid of being fat, 20% of girls have disordered eating, and more than 33% of "normal dieters" will progress to pathological dieting, which may include anorexia, bulimia, or related conditions. Among patients diagnosed with long-term anorexia, 20% will ultimately die from the direct consequences of the disorder.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that the mortality rate among people with anorexia is 0.56% per year, or approximately 5.6% per decade, or about 12 times higher than the annual death rate due to all causes of death among females ages 15 to 24 in the general population.

The interplay between the social, physiologic, and genetic aspects of eating disorders is similar to that seen in people with alcohol or drug dependency, said Craig Johnson, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital in Tulsa, Okla.

"The prevalence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia is about 4%, so the compelling question is, in a culture like ours, where there's such overwhelming exposure to these body image ideals that really don't mirror people's more normal size and shape, why do only four out of 100 kids wind up with anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Why wouldn't the prevalence rate be higher than that?"

As with alcoholics or drug addicts, there is a subgroup of people who, when they experiment with a particular form of behavior that can alter neurochemistry -- such as diet and exercise -- have a latent genetically mediated vulnerability that can trigger pathologies that would otherwise have remained dormant, Dr. Johnson said.

For example, a person who is genetically predisposed to alcoholism may not become alcohol-dependent if he or she never takes a drink, he said.

For Walter H. Kaye, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh's Western Psychiatric Institute, the issue hinges on how eating disorders and the people who suffer from them are depicted in the media.

"I guess the question is how much does this program glamorize these very serious disorders, make them appear to be appealing disorders where in fact they're not at all," said Dr. Kaye in an interview. "People with eating disorders are desperate and unhappy and often not functioning very well, and there's nothing glamorous about it."

The flip side of programs such as Starved, however, is that they bring to the public attention serious medical conditions that might otherwise be overlooked, says Dr. Weigel.

"With the recent Terry Schiavo case, we got a lot of good press about eating disorders," he says, "in that people started to pay attention to the idea that someone with an eating disorder could die from it, that it was an important illness, and I think something like that actually helped awareness of eating disorders."

For another review of Starved go to http://www.popmatters.com/tv/reviews/s/starved-050818.shtml

For the Official Website of Laura Benanti go to http://www.robbierozelle.com/laura/

For more on Starved go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starved