So I have this recurring nightmare now that I wake up in the morning and Kirstie Alley is on the floor of my bathroom wailing inconsolably and flailing wildly, the springs of a smashed scale bouncing at her feet and the remains of a mostly devoured banana cream pie smeared on her face.

This image comes courtesy, no doubt, of my having survived the first two episodes of Alley's new oh-please-let-us-be-compared-to-"Curb Your Enthusiasm" Showtime quasi-reality series "Fat Actress."

It's more than a bit ironic that the show should premiere next Monday, the day after the conclusion of Eating Disorders Awareness Week in America. "Fat Actress" takes the concept of food and weight issues to grotesque new depths, serving up Alley's seeming emotional instability and gastronomic preoccupation as fodder for a savagely broad and bawdy comedic sendup.

The fact that Showtime would exploit -- and enable the self-ridicule -- of a woman so obviously insecure, needy and vulnerable is shameful but hardly surprising. It's what television does.

Not in the network's wildest dreams could it have foreseen the promotional bonanza of being in business with an actress so reveling in the glory of her girth.

The media has taken the high-calorie bait and devoured it with gusto. Alley has already appeared on the cover of People magazine twice in the past few months. This week, she does the circuit: The "Today" show, "Late Show With David Letterman," "Larry King Live," "The View," the cover of TV Guide and a profile in the New York Times.

"This isn't just about Kirstie being a funny comedienne," says Showtime president Bob Greenblatt. "I think she has touched a nerve in how we all look at ourselves."

The real question here is: Why the frenzied interest? We might assign it to the joint obsessions in this country with weight and train wrecks. Put them together and you have an apparently unbeatable salacious recipe.

I'll tell you what galls me most about "Fat Actress." It's that the show gives the impression that it champions overweight acceptance and comfort in one's own skin when in fact it fuels fat phobia, mocking as it does the star's own size-fueled distress.

Jessica Weiner is an author, an in-demand speaker on body image issues and a producer who has created with her company No. 11 Media a TV project about full-figured women leading full lives in a leading role -- just not in the Kirstie Alley way. She's also a media ambassador for this week's nationwide focus on eating disorders.

"A show like this has the potential to be successful for all of the wrong reasons," Weiner believes. "There's a good chance of missing the larger message: that there are 65 million women above a size 14 in this country who are not self-loathing and not objects of jokes and shtick."

Unfortunately, as Weiner knows too well, fat and women's bodies remains the last bastion of acceptable discrimination in this country. "We make comments about weight that we never would about race or sexual orientation," Weiner says. "I'm working for the day when we create leading ladies of all different shapes and sizes without that being the primary issue."

In the meantime, the nation has Alley -- a monument to binge eating and its attendant psycho-social volatility -- to look to as a role model for the plus-size population.