AMC’s latest drama (now on Amazon Prime Video) — diet culture, women’s magazine, and all around misogyny satire Dietland — kicks off feeling a lot like an overstuffed plate of food fresh from the buffet line. Some tidbits look so delicious you can’t wait to devour them, and some feel like lacklustre items you maybe should have left behind, giving you more room for that tasty looking mac and cheese (or fascinating plot point). While the passé-seeming self-loathing of lead Alicia “Plum” Kettle (Joy Nash), a striving magazine writer and plus-size woman, might fall into the latter category, the over-the-top, #MeToo-flavoured revenge fantasy hidden throughout the series certainly isn’t.
The vengeful scheme is introduced in Dietland ’s series premiere, when viewers get a few stray glimpses at a cabal of masked young women who are prone to kidnapping men, holding guns to their heads, and throwing them off of highway overpasses. The group’s only apparent calling card? The word “Jennifer.” While the series’ pilot doesn’t flatly say these murdered men are perpetrators of sexual assault, it’s easy to jump to that conclusion, considering the dark fantasy of punishing predators is the well-marketed backbone of Dietland.
The mystery of Jennifer becomes all the more intriguing when fans learn there is another conspiracy at hand, which involves a sprawling beauty closet, corporate hacking, and “deprogramming” all of the young women begging Plum’s magazine Daisy Chain for help. It’s unclear if these two cryptic guerrilla operations are connected or just coincidentally rebelling against the same awful systems.
So, to help you understand what the heck is going on it Dietland, we put together a handy guide explaining everything we know about Jennifer, along with the cyber leak that very well might be related to it. Keep reading to understand television’s newest feminist uprising.
The Times We See “Jennifer”
The first time viewers actually see the word “Jennifer,” it is tattooed to the back of a young blonde woman’s neck. Thanks to all the context clues in the scene, we can guess the mystery woman is one of the individuals who helped abduct the two military veterans (and probable sexual predators), tied their wrists and mouths, held handguns to their heads, drugged them, and flung their live, covered-up bodies onto a Los Angeles freeway, only for them to be hit by a truck. All together, it’s a truly brutal murder.
As we see the young woman, she and a bunch of other women are disposing of handguns and witch masks, both of which were used during the veterans' murders.
Later, when a coroner is performing an autopsy of the dead men, he finds the word “Jennifer” scribbled on a piece of paper hidden in one of the victim’s mouths.
Photo: Courtesy of AMC.
There Is A Definite Obsession With Witches Brewing
Jennifer, with their violent displays and murders of sexual predators, are really leaning into the “witch” stereotype, literally. As previously mentioned, they use witch masks to hide their faces during their crimes.
Coincidentally, or, likely, not so coincidentally, the beauty closet conspiracy (more on that soon) is also obsessed with witches. The enigmatic Leeta (Erin Darke), the beauty closet assistant and ardent Plum fan, wears boots with the word “WITCH” scrawled on the toes. The manager of the beauty closet, Julia Smith (Tamara Tunie), yells “Witch! And not the good kind,” about an image-obsessed colleague she doesn’t like.
Photo: Courtesy of AMC.
The Beauty Closet Is Behind A Major Information Leak
When we first meet Plum’s boss Kitty Montgomery (Julianna Margulies), we find out her magazine Daisy Chain and its parent company, Austin Media, have been the victims of a massive corporate hacking. An unknown party stole the personal information of Kitty, including her home address, along with sensitive details for the entire Austin family.
By the end of the pilot, we learn the culprit is none other than Julia the beauty closet manager, who is ready to overthrow “the dissatisfaction industrial complex,” as she calls it, claiming companies like Austin, and people like Kitty, have women pay them to create flaws for them, and then the corporations profit by hawking solutions for those manufactured defects. “I say enough,” Julia announces to a confused Plum. “Time to change the game.”
The way to change the game in Julia’s mind is through “some kind of radical, covert action,” like stealing information about people like Kitty. By the end of the premiere, Julia also gets the contact information for all of “Kitty’s girls” from Plum, who ghostwrites the “Dear Kitty” column. That means Julia and Leeta can now contact all of the young women who hate themselves, seemingly due to the darkness of the “dissatisfaction industrial complex.”
Photo: Courtesy of AMC.
The Dietland Book-Within-A-Book Is Involved (How Meta!)
Julia’s right hand woman Leeta is obsessed with the book Dietland, which details a bygone weight loss “cult,” as Plum calls it, the Baptist Weight Loss Clinic. Although Plum, who was a Baptist acolyte, and Leeta don’t know each other at the start of Dietland(the show), Leeta still follows Plum around (under Julia’s orders) and gives her Dietland — the book — not under Julia’s orders.
If anyone is in charge of the conspiracies afoot, it seems to be the woman at the heart Dietland The Book. “It’s written by Verena Bapist,” Plum explains to her best friend Jake (Mark Tallman). “Her mother was the woman who started the Baptist Weight Loss Clinics … Verena’s mother died, and Verena shut everything down. I think she’s some kind of big feminist who thinks diets are the root of all evil.”
Yeah, that sounds like the introductory description for a shadowy puppet master leading violent the overthrow of all national misogyny.
Photo: Courtesy of AMC.
Jennifer Is Going To Change Plum’s Life
Amid all the many clues peppered throughout Dietland ’s pilot, it’s easy to forget one of the very first ones, which pops up before we even learn about Jennifer, the beauty closet, or any cyber warfare. In Plum’s first voiceover of the series, she confirms she is speaking from the future. And, she seems to be deeply altered in the best way possible in whatever timeline she’s is currently inhabiting.
“When I look back, think of my life at that time, it’s like it was contained in a box — a diorama,” she says over Dietland 's so-called present. “The magazine I wrote for was called Daisy Chain.” So, that means Plum will have broken out of her “box” when it’s all said and done, and she will have left Daisy Chain. In fact, considering the past tense “was” in her quote, it seems possible Kitty’s Daisy Chain will soon fall apart completely and cease to exist.
Considering Jennifer’s apparent aims to free women from their culturally forced chains by whatever means necessary, it seems quite possible the mystery group is responsible for both Plum’s big upcoming changes and Daisy Chain ’s demise.
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