(courtesy IMP Awards)
Good lord but there such an infectious vibe to people who know and love themselves.
In the nicest, least aggressive of ways (we’re not talking unreconstructed narcissists here), they own who they are, celebrate what they do and don’t feel the slightest need to begin to apologise to anyone else.
It’s intoxicatingly joyful and liberating to be around them, a vibrant vibe that is all through Survival of the Thickest which has just realised its third and final season.
Based on the collected essays of the same name by Michelle Buteau, Survival of the Thickest is one Black woman’s fight to have the world accept and love her on her own terms, whether that’s romantically, professionally or socially.
The sheer’s exuberance of Buteau’s unbridled performance as series’ protagonist Mavis Beaumont (the first name is her grandmother’s) permeates every last scene in the show, her love for her beautiful queer found family, which includes her bestie Khalil Holland (Tone Bell), who she’s known since she was 10, Peppermint (she plays a fictionalied version of herself) and host of others from across the spectrum of diverse human beings, is evident everywhere and the third season goes all out to celebrate the power of being unapologetically yourself in all your glory.
Rather happily because it’s easy to celebrate yourself when times are good, the third season also takes us through some very dark times reflecting Buteau’s life journey, the message clearly being that life is made up of the good and the bad and that whatever is going in, knowing yourself and being loved and known by others makes all the others.
The importance of the village that surrounds you is never more impactful than at certain key points in the season.
While she finds huge unconditional love and support from Luca (Marouane Zotti), with the relationship between these two gorgeous people going from strength-to-strength through out all eight episodes including ———- SPOLILER ALERT !!!!! ———- an impromptu wedding and baby!!! – it’s when she’s at one of her darkest hours that her found family well and truly proves its worth.
The joy is that these are the people who know her best and they demonstrate the veracity of how well they know her by offering assistance in ways that quietly acknowledge the pain Mavis is in while while offering ways to lead her out of the desperately sad place in which she finds herself.
It’s touching, it’s funny and it’s a masterclass in how you can be there for someone in all the right ways.
Those dark episodes somewhere in the middle of the season aside, and they are powerful and quietly insightful all at once, Survival of the Thickest is also beautifully forthright and fun when it comes to advocacy on behalf of people who don’t the very narrow, standard definition of the “body beautiful”.
That’s been a theme of all the seasons so far – here’s my reviews of seasons 1 and 2 – with Buteau playing a fashion stylist-turned-designer who refuses to accept that plus-size people can dress just as imaginatively, classily and lavishly as those who fit the narrowly acceptable standards of mainstream fashion.
She’s earnest and there are times in the third season when she has to really push the agenda and remonstrate with someone who doesn’t get why full body, whatever the body, acceptance, is so important; by and large though the messaging is delivered by celebratory declarations, positive affirmations that act as a love letter to everyone’s bodies being gorgeous and deserving of all the very best fashion to be found.
Messaging aside, and it’s everywhere, delivered organically within perfectly judged 24-minute-or-so episodes, Survival of the Thickest is at heart the story of one woman loving and owning who she is and fighting hard, often in exuberantly colourful ways to make her fully-formed and inspiringly ambitious dreams becoming a towering, unmissable reality.
Part of the reason it’s a joy to go along on this journey with Mavis is that she is absolutely the most upbeat, joyously loud person you will ever meet; she has so many friends because she generously and endlessly envelops people in her world, never once judging anyone because her ethos is that you matter, no matter how odd mainstream society thinks you are.
She is possessed of snappy dialogue, vivacious weirdness – she’s not weird at all but to the lemon-faced people of the world, all bound in bigotry and unyielding soulless orthodoxy, she is; but hey, they’re the ones who lose out here, not Mavis – and uncompromising enthusiastically effervescent sense of self.
It’s super sad to say goodbye to her and to Khalil and Peppermint and the many, wondrously diverse people in her rainbow perfect orbit, but you leave knowing she is happy and deeply, supremely so.
The final scene encapsulates it with warmhearted, huggable ease, and while giving that away would be a spoiler too far, suffice to say that Survival of the Thickest goes out with all the feels and all the power and all the joy from reaching for the stars and finding they’re reaching back, to cheers and love and applause from everyone you know and love.
The show is fantastically funny and you will laugh, and you will laugh often.
But more than that, it creates a gorgeously acceptance and warm sense of time and place, fuelled by Mavis’s never say die, giddily upbeat and fabulously loud approach to life.
She is the person you want near you, hell, with you, because she sees what life can be if she sticks to the truth of who she is and what she believes in, and she goes for it with fizzily, breezy, utterly infectious and garrulous bubbly wonder and light.
She is LIFE at its meant to be lived, unafraid of ill-informed censure, excited by what can be and caring not if someone mocks you because who’s going to lose out? Not Mavis – she has love, friends, family, enthusiasm, excitement and a deep sense that life is there for the taking and she’s going to take it all, even if it’s dark sometimes, because at the end there will be light, and it will funny, and happy, and WONDERFUL.
Survival of the Thickest streams on Netflix.
Another great interview …