Ellen Gray: Ruby deals with some weighty issues

RUBY. 8 p.m. Sunday, Style Network.

RUBY GETTINGER is ready for her closeup.

But is television ready for "Ruby"?

Starting Sunday, the 400-pound-plus star of the Style Network's newest "reality" show will be sharing some of the most intimate details of her life, from the cost of her underwear - nearly $30 per panty - to the cement blocks that support her mattress and box spring, with an audience that's more accustomed to watching Kimora Lee Simmons living "Life in the Fab Lane" or Niecy Nash "Clean House" than considering the day-to-day difficulties of a woman who can't walk for more than a few minutes at a time and has trouble finding a place to sit when she stops.

This is, literally, heavy stuff, but thanks to Ruby herself, a beautiful and undeniably charismatic Savannah, Ga., resident who invited the cameras in to tell her story, and to executive producer Gay Rosenthal, whose credits include TLC's "Little People, Big World," it's not nearly the train wreck you might be expecting.

Yet unlike Rosenthal's TLC hit, which follows the day-to-day lives of the Roloffs, a family where the parents and one of their four children are little people, "Ruby" can't just be Ruby: She's required to feed "reality" television's insatiable appetite for transformation.

No one's expecting Matt and Amy Roloff to be getting any taller, but Ruby? She's there on our TV screens to lose weight, albeit with a program of diet, gentle exercise and psychological counseling that's a long way from the regimented competition of NBC's "The Biggest Loser."

And though the fat-acceptance movement may not approve, Gettinger seems fine with that.

Asked in an interview this summer what would have been wrong if Style had simply shown her living her life at the nearly 500 pounds she weighed when filming began, she replied, "I don't think anything would be wrong with it, except for the fact that I could die living in my body."

"If I could live my life this way, and do other things, I'd be very happy," she said. "But I can't. My body won't let me, my joints are failing me," she said.

In the past two years, Gettinger, whose adult weight has ranged from 350 to more than 700 pounds, has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. She also suffers from sleep apnea and credits her two Yorkies with having saved her life by waking her up when, she believes, she had stopped breathing in her sleep.

Southern to the core, the woman who's willing to talk to anyone about the heartbreak of a former boyfriend who left her over her size - and to be filmed being weighed on two scales because one won't do the trick - refuses to disclose her age.

"Can we just say 30? Can we just lie?" she suggested to one reporter who asked.

She says she can't remember much of her childhood, something she'll be getting into with a therapist, with the camera on.

Amateur psychoanalysts will have a field day with her friendships alone.

Gettinger, who's on disability - she said she's being paid "a little bit" in connection with the show - shares a home in Savannah with a childhood friend, Jeff, and a nephew, Jim (who tells us Sunday he moved in with her after his parents acquired a cat to which he was allergic). Jim's said to be working on his GED.

Both clearly adore her. But as anyone who's ever tried to lose weight knows, love's not always enough.

"I want Ruby to lose weight so bad," says her best friend, Georgia, as she stirs the cheese in to her macaroni and cheese, preparing a dinner that will be capped by not one, but two desserts: brownies and praline cheesecake, the latter of which she brings straight to Ruby (who, yes, has already had a brownie).

Gettinger said her friends will often eat more than she does, "but it sticks to me like glue," adding that at her weight, she's unable to get as much exercise as they do.

Though she insisted the show's real - "They do whatever I do, they go wherever I go, they just live where I live" - some parts of "Ruby" can't help but feel contrived.

There is, for instance, her doctor, who tells her she'll die if she doesn't lose weight and can't seem to stop smiling while doing it, in an appointment staged like an intervention, with her mother and nephew both present.

There's the ex-boyfriend who hijacks the second episode, drawn to the cameras like a moth to a flame.

There's also the sudden arrival of a friend from the West Coast who happens to be slim and gorgeous and a workout fiend.

That friend, whom Gettinger is said to have met several years ago while living in Los Angeles, also happens to be an actress named Brittany Daniel, a regular on the CW's "The Game" and a consulting executive producer on "Ruby," which identifies her onscreen as "West Coast best friend."

Which could be the very best kind of friend to have if you want to make a show like "Ruby." *

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