The Tomlady

Kara Thrace likes to drink too much and screw too often. She’s great at her job and hates her job. Her pop ditched her and her mom beat her. She hurts people who love her and pisses off everybody else. For one brief shining moment she found true love, then ditched the guy in the morning for a quickie marriage with a man she regularly cuckolds. She is without a doubt the most passionate, insane, terribly real person on TV, even if she lives on a spaceship, worships Athena, and can’t go two minutes without saying the expletive “Frak” and its derivatives.

She isn’t hot, per se. The hot women on “Battlestar Galactica” are robots, identical duplicates played by the same Maxim-ready actresses (the adolescent boymind racing with octuplet fantasies). Six, the main hottie-cylon, is a joke of physical perfection: a blonde-haired blue-eyed plastic supermodel goddess wearing a perpetually slinky red dress. She’s always talking about God’s plan, whispering sermons in your ear like some buxom Born Again Creationist teasing you with her own innocence. She could strangle a man with one hand and playfully tickle his beard with the other. She’s the Fem Nazi as Prom Queen, a fiercely powerful woman who dominates men and occasionally lets them screw her circuits out.

Next to that, Kara’s worse than average. She’s got big eyes, an abrupt chin, short mannish hair. She’s a tomboy gone to bootcamp, a fighter pilot who drinks like a man and gambles like a drunk. She wears tank tops when she’s not in uniform. Whereas Six carries her strength with a poised runway rhythm, Kara’s a scrapper, devoted to full contact sports, perpetually covered with mud and spaceship grime.

And yet, by the fourth or fifth episode, you are in love with Kara Thrace. Full props to Katee Sackhoff, whose acting contains just the right mix of boyish jock and girlish glee. Like the women in the old Howard Hawks movies, Kara makes sexuality playful – she doesn’t hide her faults, but rather, makes her imperfections part of the attraction. In one episode she dolled up in a lime green dress just to show how nicely she can clean up, but she looked so much better in an episode this season, wearing trim military gym wear, hair mussed with sweat, fighting the man she loved (and ditched) in a boxing match that ended with the two of them, beaten and bloodied, quietly and passionately embracing.

Kara represents a new wave of women on TV – neurotic, intelligent, markedly and explicitly less attractive than other female characters, yet often responsible for carrying most of the show’s emotional weight. Think of Pam on “The Office,” quiet and dressed in tasteful secretary attire, placed next to Karen, her tan, exotically mixed-race rival dressed in classy business attire. Or Tina Fey on “30 Rock,” quick witted, sharp-featured, a goofy “Star Wars” geek in post-Wintour New York City.

Or think of Callie on “Grey’s Anatomy,” a second season addition to the show who probably weighs two Meredith Greys. I mean that as a compliment to Sara Ramirez and a meaningful exhortation to Ellen Pompeo: good god, woman, eat a hamburger! Because Callie is curvy in a voluptuous sense, recalling classical visions of beauty that occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Nicole Richie’s prominent rib cage. Callie is the anti-Meredith: spunky and assertive, an orthopedist who cracks bones back into place like Superman crushing a particularly annoying building. She’s outside the main circle of girlfriends – lucky for her, since Meredith, Izzie, and Christina edge ever further from playful narcissists to selfish ingrates.

“Grey’s” is probably the first number one show in TV history to feature a titular protagonist who pretty much everyone, both on the show and watching at home, hates. The deck is somewhat stacked against Ellen Pompeo, saddled with the horrific narration that bookends the show, which invariably follows the formula, “[famous dead guy] once said [clichéd quotation], but he never counted on [idiotic moral rejoinder to clichéd quotation which signposts themes of episode with the subtlety of a fire-breathing T. Rex].” Many critics have accused Meredith Gray of Ally McBeal syndrome: an attractive, highly-paid young professional crying woe is me because she doesn’t have the perfect man in her life. There are also echoes of “The OC”’s Marissa Cooper, another supposedly troubled character who quickly became the least believable and most uninteresting part of the show (look, Mischa Barton’s trying to act drunk!)

Pompeo, Barton and their spiritual mama Calista Flockhart are all thin, of course, still the fashion a decade after Kate Moss taught schoolgirls how to look heroin-chic with a cocaine diet. The cultural importance placed upon the pixie-ish curve-free female body represents all sorts of strange Freudian impulses in modern-day America: the tendency toward self-destruction, denying ourselves the most basic human necessities (food) in a fanatically ill-advised push toward perfection; the belief that science can make us perfect (counting carbs, losing calories, if all else fails go under the knife); the post-feminist, post-gay, post-metrosexual cultural shift towards androgyny, and the dovetailing suspicion that our country is repressing a whole lot of strange things in our head (a woman without curves is an exceptionally pretty boy).

Actresses always had to be attractive in Hollywood, but now they have to be supermodels. Halle Berry and Charlize Theron won Oscars for looking ugly, then instantly transformed into superwomen in form-fitting dominatrix costumes: Halle bared a midriff and grew claws for Catwoman, Charlize zipped up for Aeon Flux. Both films were horrible and made shit money. Neither woman has starred in anything substantive since winning the Oscar; both have appeared in a Lad Mag Hot 25 list, Berry in FHM, Charlize in Maxim.

And there’s Nicole Kidman. Flash back to 2002, and she was just about the reigning queen of the world. Out of Tom Cruise’s shadow, and Oscar-nominated two consecutive years for radically different performances: dancing up a po-mo jukebox storm in Moulin Rouge!, then writing stream-of-consciousness literature in The Hours. In the latter, she rocked a giant nose prosthetic; ever since, she’s been hyper-glam, a fashion icon, both on and off the screen. Once a quietly malicious actress (see her sly ball-breakers in To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut), has become beautiful to the point of distraction: plenty of critics said she was just too hot for Cold Mountain, especially next to a muddy Renee Zellweger. Nobody ever accused Katharine Hepburn of being too attractive, because she wasn’t attractive, because her whole persona was based on worrying about more important things, which is why when she died the whole world wept.

Kidman is turning 40 this year; Berry, 41. There is a whole generation entering adulthood (my own) raised on the societal norm that Thinner is Better. But Hotness doesn’t last forever for the individual, and its contents (What makes Hot Hot) are constantly in flux. Last summer, all the gossip rags tossed around a picture of Nicole Richie jogging in a bikini, bones protruding out of near-transparent skin, far from forgiving club lights. It’s not just that she looked ugly. She looked old. She looked decrepit. She looked elderly. Whatever eating disorder she’s cultivated, it’s reached the breaking point, when the side effects (weak bones, missed periods, all kinds of fun stuff) start to hit.

TV is always more ahead of the game than movies, and it’s tempting to read the tea leaves and hope that the signs are positive. Lost kills off eye candy like Shannon and Nikki but holds onto athletic Kate (a tremendously inappropriate friend explained to me that she has man legs). Ugly Betty sides definitively with brace-and-acne crowd, and giggles people who think you can’t notice their botox forehead. The Office taught a nation how to fall in love with the quiet girl. Then again, Entourage, the great American Male Wet Dream, is a revolving door of hotties-next-door; it’s the gender counterattack to the Sex and the City world, assuring men that, if you search hard enough, there is a Victoria’s Secret model waiting at the end of the rainbow, ready to give you the one-night-stand of a lifetime.

Kara could tear apart all the guys on Entourage. She’s smart, sporty, obsessively focused on her job and self-destructive in every other aspect of her life. She wears whatever she puts on, doesn’t fuss with her hair, rarely wears make-up, never lets her guard down. Kara, Callie, Pam, Liz Lemon; the new hotness.