. . . and Give ‘Babes’ a Lift : Series: The struggling show trims the fat jokes as it turns into a basic sitcom about three large sisters. Many fat-rights activists are fans.

Fox’s month-old series “Babes,” an unlikely comedy about three obese sisters living in a cramped New York apartment, is winning unexpected praise from advocacy groups for overweight people.

“It shows three fat sisters who are basically leading productive, happy lives,” said Sally Smith, executive director of the Sacramento-based National Assn. to Advance Fat Acceptance. “It has shown some of the discrimination that fat people face on a daily basis, and (the characters) approach the problems faced by fat people with a very positive view.”

That’s heady praise for a program whose first episode Sept. 13 showed one sister eating an entire box of cereal out of a salad bowl with an enormous spoon and later getting stuck in a chair, and the three together breaking a bed with their weight while gnawing through three bags of potato chips.

But Fox, for reasons the network will not characterize beyond vague notions of the show’s “evolution,” has been steadily whittling down the fat-joke content. By the program’s fourth episode tonight--it follows “The Simpsons” on Thursdays at 8:30--just two remarks about weight remain in the half-hour show, essentially leaving “Babes,” for better or for worse, as a basic sitcom about three sisters who just happen to be large.

“What we are doing is trying to understand how to deal with their weight appropriately,” said Peter Chernin, president of Fox Entertainment Group. “We as a network have no interest in doing a week’s worth of fat jokes every Thursday.”

To learn about the issues involved, Fox has gone to--or at least listened to--people whose lives are most affected by them, taking advice not only from the actresses who play the three sisters--Lesley Boone, Susan Peretz and Wendie Jo Sperber--but from overweight members of the community.

“They are not only accepting feedback from fat people, but they are welcoming it,” said Louise Wolfe, a member of the Fat Lip Readers Theater, an Oakland-based ensemble that writes and performs plays about fat issues. “They’ve given us a phone number and they’ve given us their address. When I called them the first time (to complain about the first show), they not only listened to my opinions, but they asked me about a specific scene, the potato-chip-eating scene.”

Whatever the idea in the beginning, the concept now, according to Chernin, is “to do for overweight people what (the NBC comedy) ‘Golden Girls’ did for older people.”

Executive Producer Candace Farrell, who helped create the series for Sandollar Productions in association with Twentieth Television, said that she had always hoped to make it a vehicle for showing overweight people leading normal lives, instead of being treated as freaks or unattractive characters.

“I started with the feeling that so much of commercials and films and television in the past few decades has been about promoting perfect people,” Farrell said. “We wanted to do a show about real women and the way they look and that it’s OK. And we wanted to stop promoting this idea that people have that they’re not thin enough, not pretty enough, not worth it.”

The fat jokes, she said, were put in the pilot to make the show more attractive to Fox.

“When you’re doing a pilot, you want to push the envelope and get noticed,” Farrell said. “Especially with a network like Fox, they want something that’s different and that’s going to stand out. If you do something more traditional, you’re not going to get noticed by them.”

If the fat jokes were what got the network’s attention, it didn’t take long for Fox to become uncomfortable with them. As early as July, when television critics met in Los Angeles to view pilots and write about new shows, Fox was hesitant to release the “Babes” pilot, saying that it might not run as the program’s first episode, and that the program was being changed.

After the premiere last month, a reporter calling to ask for a tape of the pilot was asked to view it in conjunction with tapes of later episodes because a comparison would show a new direction for the program. “We’re taking out the fat jokes,” a company spokesman said at the time.

Wolfe, of Fat Lip Readers Theater, believes that overt discussion of size is not necessary--the issue is implicit simply in the casting of the three overweight actresses and in the occasional remarks, jokes and unpleasant situations that the sisters encounter.

“They’re moving toward showing them as complete women,” Wolfe said. “The show about Darlene in her relationship with her husband, the fat part of it was implied. It was really very subtle. It showed the marriage as a whole package, involving the number of years of the relationship, weight and age.”

Chernin said that the network changed its tune in part because of input from the women who play the three sisters.

Peretz, who plays Darlene, said in an interview that she almost didn’t take the part because of worries that the program would be too exploitative, a sentiment echoed by Sperber, who plays Charlene, and Boone, who plays Marlene.

“I wanted to run for the hills,” Peretz said. “I’ve been working a long time, and one of the things I pride myself on is that a lot of the roles I get are not predicated on weight issues.”

Farrell won the women over by promising that the show would be sensitive--and that the actors would have a say.

“Any person with a weight problem is very sensitive to the subject, and the last thing you want to do is make fun of yourself,” Sperber said.

By complaining, the women were able to get several scenes removed from the pilot, including one that showed them all eating raw cookie dough.

“We complain if something feels gratuitous or over the edge,” Peretz said. If a portrayal is one that the women consider to be realistic, it stays. For example, Sperber said that the cereal-eating scene in the pilot was appropriate because sister Darlene had just had a severely traumatic experience, and it would be in character for her to respond by overeating.

“As soon as we get the script on reading day, we rehearse and go over it, and we tell them what works and what doesn’t work,” Boone said. “And they listen to us, especially with things dealing with weight. None of them are overweight, and we are.”

Despite praise from overweight viewers, “Babes,” which Fox has signed for a 13-week run, has not been faring well in the ratings. Its premiere attracted 15% of the households that were watching television at the time, and the figured dropped to 10% for the next two installments. Fox is hoping those numbers will improve with first-run episodes of lead-in “The Simpsons” beginning tonight.

But whatever its future in the television ratings game, for some viewers, the program has already served a purpose.

“Fat people have internalized a message from society that says, ‘You don’t deserve to have a good life, you don’t deserve to be happy, you don’t deserve the job, the partner, the nice clothes, you don’t deserve to be able to travel in comfort,’ ” said Smith of the National Assn. to Advance Fat Acceptance. “The show says that you don’t have to put your life on hold waiting for that magic moment when you are thin, that there are problems and hassles being fat, but you can live your life and be a happy, complete person.”