It’s so fun to be known for my obsession with teen television, because sometimes friends come along and recommend some absolute gems.
My Mad Fat Diary is a six-episode British teen drama from early 2013. Based on author Rae Earl’s My Fat Mad Teenage Diary, this story is told through the unfiltered teen angst of protagonist Rae’s diary. Set in the mid 1990s, the series follows Rae, a music-loving, fat sixteen-year-old, the summer after she is released from a psychiatric hospital, where she had been recovering from a mental breakdown.
Mental illness is unsurprisingly a significant theme throughout the series as Rae returns to the hospital to visit friends and for her therapy sessions. Personally, I love the way the series never labels the illnesses of Rae and her friends. It simply refers to her having been sick, and leaves it at that. While it makes it a little trickier for people like me to write about (without handing me easy adjectives like “bulimic” or “depressive”), it allows the characters room to breath and expand, as three-dimensional people with lives involving – but not merely reduced to – their illnesses.
The series doesn’t shy away from the awkward and the painful either, such as moments when Rae’s best friend, the beautiful and skinny Chloe, tells Rae that boys won’t find her attractive because she’s fat. It makes you want to scream at the television; Don’t listen to her, Rae, she’s just a little stupid and maybe even jealous! But despite these tragic scenes, there are also hilarious moments of light-hearted comedy. Rae is no passive victim, and no fool, even if she does occasionally succumb to self-consciousness, melodrama, and naiveté.
While the narrative relies on Rae’s self-consciousness as a big-bodied girl with skinny, beautiful friends, it is somewhat disappointing that star Sharon Rooney is the only actor on the series to fall into that “overweight” category. No wonder Rae’s self-conscious, if she’s the only fat person her small, isolated town has ever seen! On the other hand, it is refreshing that she is not shunted to the sidelines as a token fat girl, but is in fact our lens and narrator, recounting her story from her perspective.
The way Rae’s narration is pulled straight from her diary, with animated doodles, teenage angst and hyperbole, situates viewers deep within the psyche and the emotional journey of a sixteen-year-old girl. Unlike the soulful, but often trite passages found in The Vampire Diaries, the self-aware blog on Awkward, or the quietly reflective narration in My So-Called Life, Rae’s diary is clearly the raw emotional outlet of an angry, hormonal, self-conscious, actual young person. Far from censoring herself, she screams and cries and raves on the page. Quite apart from the cool or collected assessment of a situation, Rae’s diary is biased, emotional, without perspective or any sort of objective insight. This is not only a refreshing portrayal of adolescence, but the unreliable narrator in these passages provides some fantastic juxtaposition between diary and reality.
It’s incredible to try and list the narrative threads that somehow make up this short a series. So many traditional teen drama issues are represented—from friendships new and old, bullying, drugs, house parties, first kisses, sexual awakening, coming out, teen pregnancy, and conflict with parents—that it is remarkable that My Mad Fat Diary also delves into the complexity of Rae’s personal and psychological situation. On top of that, the supporting cast of characters is really fantastic, in particular I can’t help but point out the brilliance of Rae’s dishevelled but incredibly kind and compelling therapist (Ian Hart), and her Tunisian-loving, fad-dieting mother (Claire Rushbrook).
My Mad Fat Diary is a really fantastic example of contemporary teen drama. It skirts past clichés and wades into traditional teen issues, but above all it creates a whole new story with a new take on the teen experience. Set nearly 20 years ago, the series exists in a universe apart from our everyday reality, yet it brings to life so much rich detail that would never have been seen on TV in the actual 90s. I’m really glad to have spent six hours on this series, and will happily come back to Rae’s world when the second season comes out.
