FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 27, 2010
TELEVISION REVIEW | ‘PLAIN JANE’
Ugly Duckling Grows New Feathers and Learns to Strut Them
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
During the early to mid years of the last decade, makeover shows seemed to provide the perfect complement to our pipe-dream economic models. While people were living in mock Tudors they couldn’t afford, reality series like “Extreme Makeover” and “The Swan” told us that any woman could look like Angelina Jolie. Rhinoplasty, collagen, eyelid lifts, dermabrasion and a radical recalibration of muscle-to-fat ratios best achieved by a strategy of liposuction and 23-hour-a-day personal training were all it took. The anachronistic charms of “Plain Jane” come at us from a whole new world.
The series (beginning on Wednesday on CW) maintains the “Sex and the Single Girl” belief that all a makeover really means is a shorter dress, more voluminous hair and a generously applied prescription of spunkiness. “Plain Jane” puts enormous faith in the transformative powers of that third ingredient, thus marking the show as a proponent of change-from-the-inside-but-only-with-a-department-store-credit-card. “Plain Jane” borrows from the annals of generic self-help as freely as it borrows from “What Not to Wear,” though it rejects that series’s snarky criticisms of the inexplicably dressed. What we get instead is a gentle admonition against flannel shirts, flat shoes and female burping.
While it may stand as a rebuke to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, “Plain Jane” provides its own Dr. Feelgood in the form of a gratingly upbeat British fashion writer named Louise Roe Ms. Roe sees herself not as a reality-television host but as a professional friend turning androgynously dressed wallflowers into hot women with the confidence to pick up guys at dog runs. What qualifies her for the role? “I’ve written about relationship advice and flirting and guys, as well as the fashion side,” Ms. Roe explains. “I invented stalking boys.”
Her first patient is a shy, hunched-over woman in her early 20s named Cristen, who confides that she has been on only one real date in her entire life. Because this genre calls for stunned reaction shots to come at us like tennis balls from an automated server, Ms. Roe responds to this news as if she had been told that Osama bin Laden was hiding out as a candy striper at Mass General.
Cristen has been crazy about her best friend for six years, and Ms. Roe is convinced that she can secure a love connection, as long as Cristen is willing to give up the granny dresses and crippling self-effacement. The plan of attack involves platform shoes and “jeggings”: the fashion dictionary term for jeans that look like leggings. And it also requires that Cristen mount an all-points battle against her anxieties, which extend to a paralyzing fear of snails.
“Plain Jane” is more than shopping spree and vocabulary builder; it betrays a cockamamie respect for the therapeutic process, and it shouldn’t be giving too much away to tell you that the snails lose, that the plain Janes blossom, and that no stimulus money has been wasted along the way.