On The Biggest Loser

“Your butt is wide, well mine is too

Just watch your mouth or I'll sit on you

The word is out, better treat me right

'Cause I'm the king of cellulite”

~ ‘Fat’, lyrics by Weird Al Yankovic

from his album “Even Worse”, 1988

Reality TV is an odd beast.  Reality television shows are so named due to their lack of a script and outside of the hosts, the players are supposedly people just like you and I. That's the theory at least.  Since reality TV in most of its current guises doesn't resemble any kind of reality that I'm familiar with, I suspect that those two defining pillars are shaky at best.  Another factor would have to be judicious editing, which creates the strong suggestion of storylines, embellishes characters (both heroic and villainous), and designs dramatic tensions where little likely exist in isolation.

I've been suckered into watching more of these shows than I'm proud to admit.  My family too.  A particular favourite amongst my household, much to my chagrin, is The Biggest Loser (Channel 10).

I remember when this show was first announced, I assumed it was a show designed to humiliate the less fortunate among us.  I was never so naive as to think that reality TV would not slump to such lows, as shows of the calibre of The Bachelor, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, Big Brother and Jersey Shore will attest.  It seems reality TV never ceases to find new and unusual ways to take advantage of the physically weak, the intellectually dull, the emotionally frail, and the morally bankrupt in the zealous pursuit of viewers’ loyalties and advertisers’ dollars.

 The Biggest Loser, for the uninitiated, has us follow a number of overweight and obese contestants as they attempt to lose as much weight as possible over a number of weeks.  They do this by altering their diet and exercising under the direction of team leaders, essentially personal trainers.  The trainers are suitable for the task, lean and muscular, both buff and holding an often informal relationship with the English language.  Shannon Ponton, in keeping with the show's custom of never allowing an opportunity for cross-promotion go begging, has released a self-help book entitled (I wish I was kidding) Hard'n Up.  Über-serious pseudo-drill sergeant Steve "The Commando" Willis wears camouflage pants and black boots, and is so tough he wears dark glasses indoors.  Tiffany Hall trains her "ninjas" in a groan-worthy "do-Jane" (as opposed to a dojo).  Never does an episode go by without these cartoon characters delivering some pompous pseudo-intellectual pop-psychology.

Worse still are this season's contestants.  While there have been some remarkable success stories in previous seasons in terms of weight loss and lifestyle changes (mainly consisting of getting jobs hawking weight loss products in the ad breaks during latter seasons of the show - how's that for pop culture eating itself?), it seems that this year's contestants have assumed that they will have similar success by virtue of merely appearing on the show.  Hardly any of them have been willing to allow the trainers to seriously push them to their limits in order to achieve significant weight losses.  The trainers are constantly claiming that they can "sense that something is wrong", that so-and-so is not "doing the work", that they will confront them with some "hard truths", and then breathlessly advise the viewing audience afterwards that the contestant has "really turned a corner".  The contestant is usually just as half-arsed the next day.

Of course this just adds to the incessant, maddening drama of the whole thing.  Given that the contestants are largely secluded from the outside world at "Camp Biggest Loser", supplied plenty of healthy food, educated in regards to their lifestyles and given access to state-of-the-art gym facilities, there is no earthly reason why they shouldn't lose weight hand over chubby fist.  The truth is that these people often have significant psychological baggage associated with their immense size, none of which is helped by appearing on what is essentially a glorified game show.  I've come to a rather stunning conclusion that lends some sense to what is an increasingly bizarre exercise.

The Biggest Loser is not about weight loss.  Not at all.

Consider first the main theme of this year's series, Biggest Loser - Singles.  All the contestants are without partners, ranging from the "never-been-kissed" to the lonely to the divorced, which the show has promoted heavily.  The show’s host mercilessly interrogates the contestants as to their longings and heartbreaks and presents their breakdowns in vivid high-definition technicolour.  The message writ large is that if you are overweight, you can abandon all hope that anyone will ever love you for who you are.  The contestants’ stories are the entertainment, and when two of the younger contestants this season began to show affection towards one another, the production was all over them like white on rice.  The young man involved, a twenty-year-old named Hamish, became a favourite of my kin, due to his propensity to tantrum and bawl at the merest of provocations.  The show pushed his relationship with twenty-four-year-old Michelle hard as the discovery of love between two mature young people, when in reality it seemed more like puppy love between children.  When an exercise-averse Hamish was inevitably given the boot, the producers found several excuses to bring him back into the show.  They did something very similar in the first season when public favourite Adro was dumped near the show's conclusion.  The show's producers created a ludicrous contrivance for Adro to re-enter the show and he went on to eventually win the grand prize.  

Furthermore, consider one of the show's staples: the element of the contest known as Temptation.  Temptation is where the contestants are offered treats in the form of calorie rich foods, the acceptance and consumption of which allows them to compete against each other for immunity from eviction from the show.  Contestants will often gorge themselves stupid during Temptation only to lose to another contestant who was willing to go just that little bit further.  Young Hamish was a frequent player of the Temptation game, his eyes lighting up gleefully every time another tasty morsel was offered to him.  It can't possibly be argued that a show that is dedicated to weight loss would assemble such a group of people, with all their frailties and proclivities and offer them rewards of that which got them to the state they're in to start with.  At best, Temptation is morally suspect.

It's really all about the drama, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.  This season's been positively obese with it.

The current season of the show is ending very soon, and I doubt this year's denouement will see the examples of extraordinary weight loss that previous seasons have. There just hasn't been much spark with this bunch, no fire in their oversized bellies.  There is often a discernible shift in the mental attitude of the contestants during the season when the lifestyle changes they embark on 'click'.  Not so much this year.  The nature of the current series appears to have delivered participants with more baggage than previous seasons.   Perhaps this is also a conceit aimed at delivering more visceral drama than ever as escalation is needed to maintain the audience's attention and avoid the apathy that comes with familiarity.  This baggage has been more than the beefcake trainers have been able to overcome and, using the show's parlance, the contestants have repeatedly failed to "pull big numbers".  The show is unconcerned; as I said, it's not at all about weight loss.

I'll not be sad to see this season end.  It's also likely I'll rue the day when another season is announced and the overwhelming barrage of cheesy advertisements begins to assault us next year.  I'll be looking for ways to distract the family from engaging with the show.  I'll try, and maybe even succeed.

In the meantime, doesn't this next season of Masterchef look promising?

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