Imagine that you're a cable network putting together a reality television show about the employees of the Wilhelmina modeling agency. It is salacious and overly dramatic; it involves naked, pretty people, a glamorous industry, and alcohol; it stars a group of unhinged, combative, and despicable individuals proud to say any offensive thing on-camera. It is perfect. The only problem is that the agents' attitudes toward dieting are basically the same as a meth head's toward his drug of choice: Always do more of it, even if you already look like a skeletal stick insect.

Now you, a responsible cable network, know that eating disorders are, well, unhealthy. And you also know that, sigh, there are probably a whole bunch of groups out there, like Moms Against Eating Disorders or something, who will be really upset if you air a show in which women who are 5 feet 10 inches tall and size 0 are told they're cows and like the Pillsbury Doughboy, and that it'd be better if they were "less hungry for fucking sandwiches and more hungry for being a top model." If you want to avoid a lot of angry phone calls—and you do—you're going to have to air a public service announcement about how bad eating disorders are after each episode.

The PSA you decide to go with is really powerful. It's of a little girl, spitting insults into the camera, like, "You're fat. You weigh a ton. Porko." But as the screen opens up, you see she's looking in the mirror. She's saying all those nasty things to herself! Then the ad tells you, "Forty percent of all 9-year-old girls have dieted. It's not our bodies that need changing, it's our attitudes." So true.

You're pleased, because the PSA is really going to do a great job mitigating all the nasty things said on The Agency. Without it, young girls might have thought that if people were calling models fat, they must be fat too. But now everyone who watches will totally understand that models are sometimes too fat to be models, but 9-year-olds who are way fatter than models are never too fat to be 9 years old. Won't they?—Willa Paskin

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LINKS
• Wilhelmina site
• The Agency site