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“Let’s Get Physical”
Review of Apple TV’s “Physical”
So, I’ve been eagerly and excitedly watching this show and it’s awesome! Set in the 1980’s (the pic above accurately depicts this) it’s about a very bitter woman with a special secret: she has quite a substantial eating disorder.
Did I mention that her character lives in California, land of the impossibly beautiful and perfect? This would certainly not seem to help matters at all. BUT through the magic and power of an aerobics class that Sheila attends one day something quite unusual and illuminating happens: she finds her voice.
She finds her power. She finds her beauty. And perhaps most importantly of all, even though she continues to struggle with her eating disorder, she finds her self worth and self respect; in other words, she finds at long last — HERSELF — absent her role as the wife of a pompous academic and mother to what appears to be quite the bratty child — she finds HER and perhaps most miraculously of all, she begins to appreciate and value not just her body and what it can do FOR her but also how very empowering all of this is for her.
The most interesting aspect of this show is that we, as the viewers, get to listen in on Sheila’s interior monologue, mostly against herself, a never ending commentary on her totally at odds skewed perspective: she perceives herself as fat and ugly, when…
