Made

12-1 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 11

This nicely constructed six-part MTV series of hours is about teenagers trying to become something they're not.

No, they don't attempt the impossible -- that is, trying to behave sweetly and rationally. Instead, "Made" shows them working hard and nobly to embrace roles for which they may be naturally ill-suited. The fleshy, bespectacled drama student makes herself over into a cheerleader. The high school football player transforms into a (gasp!) opera singer. The lifelong nerd tries to make the basketball team. It's all done with MTV's trademark quick-cut precision and concurrent driving rock beat. And it works with a surprising lack of contrivance.

The opener introduces us to Diana Graziano. When we meet her, she's 17 and just finishing up her junior year at Manasquan High School in the shoreline community of Sea Girt, N.J. She is overweight, with horn-rimmed glasses and a gawky/klutzy manner. She's also a diehard member of the school's drama program, hanging with the stage freaks and generally viewing every other group as either insufferable snobs or hopeless dweebs.

So Diana's fellow drama types see it almost as treason when she announces that she hopes to metamorphose into a cheerleader by the following fall. ("You're gonna be one of ... them?") It's rather like John Goodman deciding to take up ballet. The odds don't appear to be on the girl's side going in. To even begin to describe her early attempts at technique would be overly cruel.

We follow Diana's slow and agonizing road to cheerleader-dom through a summer spent eating salads and a strict diet prescribed by a nutritionist, doing push-ups, sweating through punishing aerobic workouts with a slave-driving champion trainer and generally turning from one stout and very out-of-shape girl into a decidedly less stout and slightly more in-shape adolescent. And once we find out that she's living with her aunt and uncle because both her parents died years earlier, we can't possibly get more firmly in her corner.

By the last couple of weeks spent at cheerleader camp and in private training, Diana is able to jump and exult in a manner more or less reminiscent of a real cheerleader. Not to spoil things, but her story has the requisite happy ending here. After all of that work, you didn't think she was going to fail to make the team, did you?

Low-budget though it may be (as is everything at MTV), "Made" spotlights a gimmick that pretty much works -- at least in the premiere. Kudos to exec producers Bob Kusbit, Mike Powers and Tony DiSanto and producer-director Lindsey Bannister for constructing a concept that carries a modicum of heft and even poignancy.

MADE
MTV
One Louder Prods. and MTV
Credits:
Executive producers: Bob Kusbit, Mike Powers, Tony DiSanto
Producer-director: Lindsey Bannister
Field producer: Heather Walsh
Consulting supervising producer: Angie Day
Line producer: Stephanie Morrissey
Writer: Amy Brill
Editors: Miles Barkin, John LaPrade, Lindsey Bannister, Angie Day
Coaches: Jim McMullan, Kathy Pearlberg, Mike Brancato
Casting: Tori Asness, Shadow Holden