Get a load of this: She’s old and fat

About a year ago, the comic actress Kirstie Alley spent five days in bed, thinking. The hiatus she’d taken to spend more time with her children had lasted too long, she thought.

Her phone wasn’t ringing so much. She missed acting as if it were oxygen. “Cheers,” the “Look Who’s Talking” movies, the People’s Choice awards and her last sitcom, “Veronica’s Closet,” were old news. She had gained 60 or 70 pounds. She was 53 years old.

She had come face to face with “the void,” something women in Hollywood have complained about since the first screen actress passed 40. But face-in-the-pillow victimhood felt to her like “a pretty creepy position.”

So Alley gathered up her 200 pounds, got out of her funky Italianate villa in Los Feliz and created a vehicle for herself that Hollywood would never have offered. Her semi-scripted series, “Fat Actress,” will debut March 7 on Showtime. “If you still want to play the game, you’ve got to get creative,” Alley said. “And I still wanted to play the game.”

“Fat Actress” is not only a way one actress found to crack the system, it will also be the first of a wave of women-in-Hollywood comedy that will hit TV this year. Rather than complaining about their humiliation and indignity with the earnest, outraged tone we’re used to hearing on the subject, older actresses are now embracing and even exploiting the comic value of their ego-killing career troubles.

Comedian Kathy Griffin has been working this terrain for a while now in one-woman comedy shows such as “Kathy Griffin: The D-List,” which served up her frustration and angst along with sharp, sometimes nasty observations about the Hollywood scene. Bravo ran it as a special last year, and now the cable channel is spinning it out into a six-episode, unscripted series called “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.” Now in production and likely to air in the fall, the new show “seeks to go behind the sources of Kathy’s comedic life,” said Bravo President Lauren Zalaznick. It will include clips of Griffin trying to get booked on “The Tonight Show” and dealing with A-list celebrities she’s invited to a charity. Zalaznick described the show as “the perfect intersection of pop culture and celebrity but in a smart, one-step-removed kind of way. We get to be outsiders with her. She’s the ‘loser’ in all of us.”

But it is not as easy as it looks to play the loser for laughs -- especially in the privileged realms of Hollywood. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David seems in control even at his most extreme moments of embarrassment, stopping short of true humiliation. The risk these women’s shows face is that the self-exposure that seems courageous at first blush could end up seeming pathetic or self-indulgent -- or, perhaps even worse, unfunny.

Spinning humiliation

Another highly anticipated show that is gingerly working the comically humiliated-older-actress vein is Lisa Kudrow’s scripted sitcom for HBO, “The Comeback,” being co-written by the ex-”Friends” star and “Sex and the City’s” Michael Patrick King. The series follows the fictional 40-year-old Valerie Cherish, an out-of-work actress reduced to playing herself on a reality show. No air date has been set.

At a press conference in January to promote “The Comeback,” Kudrow called her character a “smart and thinking comedic actress” whose priorities are “just way off.” She said, “There’s something kind of tragic about this, and I think there are moments where you feel a little uncomfortable in a good way.

“One of the things I like about this character was just how she spins humiliation,” Kudrow said. As she awkwardly fielded carefully composed questions about the state of her career, Kudrow added, “To me, nothing is more humiliating than reality cameras photographing people.”

But Griffin has said the last thing she wants is privacy: “The entire industry can come to my house and photograph me in my underwear.... I love Lisa Kudrow, but there are more humiliating things than being on a reality show.”

The key to avoiding real humiliation, Zalaznick said, is that Griffin is in control of the show. “It’s the empowerment argument in forms of media, especially those with women at the core. If they’re in control of their image, no matter what it is, who’s to say that’s not a positive?”

Able to laugh at herself

“Comedy is about tragedy,” Alley said, sitting cross-legged on a deep, shabby chic couch in her hillside home. “My best kind of comedy is comedy as self-deprecation,” she said. “There wasn’t something physically funny about me before. Now there’s something physically funny about me.”

But Alley said she still feels vulnerable playing a version of herself in “Fat Actress.” The premiere episode has cringe-worthy scenes of Alley sashaying obliviously through NBC’s corporate offices to pitch a snickering Jeff Zucker. She pursues black men romantically because she’s heard they like large women.

In subsequent episodes, she tries to squeeze into size 6 pants to attract Kid Rock, dates a crybaby billionaire and considers using parasites or laxatives, surrounding herself with small people and things (the “koi effect”), and smoking crack cocaine to lose weight.

Alley said that while her main intention was to write something funny, she had to complete some serious inner work before she could do it. Once she got herself out of her five-day bed funk, Alley, a devotee of Scientology, said she did “some different Scientology activities” that promote personal responsibility. She would, she decided, lose weight and write something to suit her sense of humor -- not Hollywood’s.

“I don’t ever want people to think I’m degrading somebody’s body size,” she said. “But if you see a big, fat dachshund walk in here, you’re going to start laughing.”

Scientologists believe “that which you resist, you become,” she said. “It was ‘Matrix’-ish. You just let the bullet pass through. It felt like that: Whoosh! Yow!

“The second I announced the show, it was like I was free. Then it became the reverse vector. It became, ‘Bring it on.’ ”

One particularly colorful line of dialogue in the premiere referring to Jenny Craig was cut after Alley signed up in real life to promote the weight-loss method in commercials. Alley said Showtime was aware from the start that she planned on losing weight. Her goal is not to remake herself for more-commercial appeal, she said, but to feel more agile. Last summer, she said, she wanted to try a handstand in her backyard and was shocked that her arms wouldn’t support her weight. “I almost broke my arm,” she said.

In retrospect, she can also laugh at her denial. As she grew larger, she said she actually thought her furniture was getting smaller and that her clothes were shrinking.

So far, she said, she’s lost 13 pounds and would like to get down to “the meaty side of thin,” which she figures will take six months.

A more-slender Alley would not necessarily spell the end of “Fat Actress.” Plenty of issues remain for actresses over 40, she said, all good comic fodder. “The second I handle the fat thing, there’s going to be the ‘We want a younger Kirstie Alley for this role. Billionaires marry women 25 years younger than they are.’ ”

Even if Showtime doesn’t order any more than the seven half-hour episodes of “Fat Actress” that have been shot, Alley said she now has the confidence that she could create something else. She has written a diary of her life-changing year, “How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life,” that Rodale Books will publish in March.

In Hollywood, she said, “The honest-to-God truth is that the system accepts almost nothing. It’s a cliche to say we aren’t accepted in Hollywood. Well, who the hell is? You have to create it for yourself.”