One advantage that alcoholics have over carboholics: They can't necessarily be spotted on sight. They don't carry their "shame" around with them -- one of the incidental realities intelligently addressed in "To Be Fat Like Me," a well-meant if eventually confused movie premiering on Lifetime tonight at 9.

Obviously, the topic of tubbiness is one that both real and fictitious people usually treat with gags and japes, at least on television. Merely choosing to deal with it seriously is to the credit of writer Michelle Lovretta, director Douglas Barr and the innumerable producers. Unfortunately they're all subject to the Lifetime politburo: The moral to the tale must be so obvious, for instance, that no one could miss it. In fact, it's spoken directly into the camera in the final moments of the film.

In addition, all women depicted must be "empowered" to some degree, with no sign of weakness. When, in tonight's film, the teenage heroine's mother cries, she does it off-camera. She literally shuts the door in the viewer's face. That's life -- er, Lifetime.

It takes about 15 minutes to set up the premise, which is based on a New York teenager's real-life adventure , taped and aired by ABC News in 2003. Kaley Cuoco, a very assured and attractive young star, plays a girl named Aly (real teen's name: Ali -- creative license?), who disguises her athletic body and adorable face with padding and prosthetics so that she can live life as a fat person -- and then turn her experiences into a documentary called, surprise surprise, "Fat Like Me."

It wasn't an entirely original gambit even in 2003. A brave journalist friend of mine, as it happens, had the idea years earlier, donned a pillow-filled suit and an artificially inflated face, and turned her ordeal into a touching magazine piece.

Whatever. The things that happen to Fat Aly open Fit Aly's eyes, and even if some of the reactions she gets are predictable -- from the disapproving stares of female body-snobs to cruel ridicule from spiteful guys (one goes "moo" as she passes; another says, "Wide load coming through") -- they're all dramatized with credible credibility and convincing conviction.

It's all Mom's fault
Aly's attitudes toward The Fat are not entirely academic. Earlier in life, we learn, her mother (played with nicely shaded subtlety by Caroline Rhea) had emotional problems that led to binge eating, then to diabetes and a heart attack. Aly looks back on this period not with compassion but with bitterness, and the deeper she gets into her documentary, the more hostile she becomes toward poor Mom, eventually lashing out with heartless cruelty.

Meanwhile, Fat Aly makes a friend at summer school of a genuinely obese girl, Ramona, played with unquestionable authority by Melissa Halstrom; she probably gives the most heartfelt performance, if partly by default (Halstrom knows what it is to be overweight as well as Ramona does). When Ramona finds out that Aly befriended her just to capture her responses on video, she throws a fit and stomps off.

You'd think Aly could save the day by coming up with well-chosen words about the project and its potential benefits to fat people -- but writer Lovretta drags the tiff out too long. This tends to make Aly look inarticulate at best. Portraying a character as both smart and stupid isn't necessarily showing complexity; here it seems like inconsistency for the sake of dramatic conflict.

Does it all end happily? Not in the simplistic sense, though at least there are no bloodied dead bodies littering the lawn. Along the way the filmmakers stage some particularly satisfying encounters, as when Aly talks Ramona into going into a store that sells clothes for "normal"-size women instead of a fatties' shop, and then is met with a cold brushoff by a snide salesclerk; Aly lets her have it in no uncertain terms. She even gets the clerk a reprimand from her boss -- the kind of wish-fulfillment scene some of us would love to bring off in real life.

As for the mandated moral, it's considerably more profound than "beauty is only skin deep" or other such platitudes. "To Be Fat Like Me" sometimes pulls back just when it threatens to become truly affecting, but by and large it gets the job done, and Cuoco shows high promise as a beautiful but believable new star -- as long as she lays off the Ho Hos and Oreos, of course.

Kidding. I'm kidding. Honest.

'Gay, Straight or Taken?'
Remarks we doubt ever got remarked during planning sessions in the offices of reality show producers:

"We can't do that, it's too stupid."

"By all means, let's stay within the bounds of good taste."

"But -- no network would ever air a piece of trash like that."

In a kinder and gentler world, such sentiments would be used to shoot down the most egregious ideas for new shows. But we don't live there, we live here, and so it is that Lifetime tonight at 8 unveils "Gay, Straight or Taken?" -- a reality game show that's even more cringe-inducing than it sounds and less entertaining than a bowl of oyster stew.

Are you ready for this? Believe me, you don't want to be. "This" is, as the title suggests, a game in which a young woman must pick a dream date from among a trio of young men -- one of them homosexual, one involved in a heterosexual relationship (not necessarily marriage) and the third an available piece of meat. If the woman picks the third alternative, off the two of them go on a free vacation.

If she picks the gay guy, he gets the prize with the partner of his choice; it's the same for the "taken" lad. But wait a minute. On the premiere, we learn early on that the gay man has a steady boyfriend -- so doesn't that make him "taken," too? Why should "gay" and "taken" be considered separate and distinct? Is it, perhaps, because the producers assume all gay men are too promiscuous for lasting relationships?

So much for the comments of one executive producer that "this show really turns stereotypes on its head."

The odor of faked spontaneity
The TV landscape is already full of vulgar, lame-brained dating shows, of course. But most of them at least look as though they took more production time than Lifetime's loser. From the appearance of it, the whole thing was taped in one afternoon in the back yard of the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Then there's the "reality" ruse. Jenner, the 27-year-old contestant, "works in real estate," we are told. The three men -- Luciano, 32, Mike, 35, and Chris, 34 -- have such nebulous jobs as "club promoter." It's pitifully obvious: This is L.A., and just as waiters are never merely waiters, so all these people look like part-time aspiring actors. With good jobs hard to find, they take on hideous gigs like this one.

"I feel like I'm at Toys R Us," gushes the bubbly Jenner as the game begins. Soon the handsome, plastic hunks are parading their pecs around. How to tell gay from straight? Jenner plays a touch football game, asks for a massage, does some yoga exercises, takes a dance lesson and -- get this -- ransacks their cars, in a page borrowed from one of the umpteen dating shows on MTV.

Actually, "Gay, Straight or Taken?" plays like a series that MTV might have aired seven or eight trends ago -- only it would have been better made.

Since whoever's gay is careful not to "act" gay, whatever that means these days, Jenner's search for clues seems particularly absurd. Does she expect that a gay man, asked to give her a massage, will fling his arms into the air and run off in horror? Naturally, as the rules of the format insist, the show is punctuated with remarks of Jenner and the contestants taped afterward as they look back and try to dramatize various moments on the show.

The air is thick with the odor of faked spontaneity. Many of the impromptu remarks sound rehearsed and manipulated. A huge scandal and the intervention of Congress ended the big quiz show fad of the 1950s, when viewers learned that seeming geniuses were fed answers in advance. It's doubtful anyone will demand an investigation of these asinine reality game shows, but an awful lot of this "unscripted" programming looks very scripted indeed.

Perhaps the first question to be asked of such productions: "Is it worse than worthless?" Worthlessness in such cases is pretty much a given, a starting point. Have the producers managed to go beyond that into the aggressively idiotic? In the case of "Gay, Straight or Taken?" the answer is a depressing "yes."