"Any way you cut it, 5'9", 140 is fat, right?"

Only Eric Schaeffer could say that line and not creep me out. Some girls are into Steve Buscemi, or Billy Bob Thornton, but my ugly-hot actor crush has always been on Eric Schaeffer. The writer-director-producer-star of such unabashedly personal films such as Fall and Wirey Spindell performs all of the above functions in the new FX series Starved, and, like his films, it's a real love it/hate it proposition. As I say, I've got a thing for the guy, but tonight's premiere might have won me over regardless. The show can really be summed up in one oft-bandied buzz phrase, but with a twist: this is food porn on the least glamorous level imaginable.




Schaffer plays Sam, a neurotic, anorexic late-thirty-something New Yorker with a thing for plastic-wrapped chocolate snack cakes.  Sam's obsessed with a television commercial for Godiva chocolates, in which an impossibly slim British woman in red shoes eats biscuits and snogs a lucky bachelor. When Sam meets a cute blonde named Sarah on the subway and she suggests they meet up later at Whole Foods, Schaeffer drools out Sam's response as only he can: "We're going to have our first date at a supermarket? I am in love with you." He then sets to work remaking her in the image of the Godiva girl: her "ugly wicker shoes" are replaced with cute new red ones ("You don't want these anymore, right? ... we'll just leave them for a homeless lady"); her need to talk about her day is sanctioned only if she'll do it in an English accent, preferably with Sam's penis in her mouth. Typical jerky guy stuff, right? Well, never write off a compulsive eater: even after suggesting they see other people, Sam flips as soon as Sarah isn't available for impulse consumption.

Along with friends Billie, Dan and Adam, Sam attends meetings of a radical support group for sufferers of eating disorders called BeltTighteners. Actually, "support" might be a misnomer for BeltTighteners -- when members divulge their obsessive food-related behavior (cop Adam admits to eating thousands of almonds, throwing them up whole, washing and re-ingesting them), the group announced in unison, "That is not okay!" And it isn't - soon enough, Adam is accidentally projectile vomitting on a homeless man whilst on the job.

Scenes like this (and the one where the boys use Billie's food scale to measure their penises, and others, ad infinitum) are probably going to be misinterpreted as shock-for-shock's sake, but Starved makes its real points in a much more elegant fashion. What's actually most shocking about Starved is that it hasn't been done before. Sam and friends are no different from the rest of us deers in the headlights of consumer culture. We're told at pretty much every turn that gluttony is good - as long as it doesn't show on our thighs. Even when engaged in the giddily outrageous, Starved feels like a highly stylized tackling of deeply nuanced personal issues.

The thesis statement of the whole thing starts to pop out with a montage Sam creates by flipping channels on his TV: back-to-back-to-back-to-back ads for skinny lifestyle products are interrupted by a sole, lonely phone sex commercial. Sam then picks up the phone and calls everyone he knows - and everyone is sitting at home, alone, screening their calls. The need to consume and the need to communicate are flipsides of a very slippery coin - those of us who have a problem with one are pretty damn sure to have issues with the other.