Because The Biggest Loser is back.
I just started watching last season and I know that means I am terminally late to the party but good gravy do I love this show. I love the in-your-face gender role reversal of the male trainer who is all touchy-feely and nurturing and the female trainer who runs her gym workouts with a merciless iron fist. I love the fact that Alison Sweeney has the impossible job of providing play-by-play commentary for the physical challenges the contestants engage in and sometimes these challenges are isometrics, which means Alison is breathlessly describing PEOPLE STANDING VERY STILL. The only thing that could make this more entertaining is if Alison got into character as evil scheming Sami Brady from mid-90’s Days of Our Lives and really stirred some shit between the contestants – this has yet to happen but I remain hopeful.
I love every tried and true reality tv trope that The Biggest Loser trots out. I’m fascinated by the way that reality tv in general has blown up over the past decade or so and at this point I derive most of my entertainment trying to work out exactly what contorted definition of “reality” any given show adheres to. All shows create their own version of reality, just by inserting a camera crew into an otherwise normal situation and then by editing the raw footage that results. I trust shows like No reservations or Living With the Mek to keep the un-reality to a minimal if non-zero amount. And I expect shows like Rock of Love to be as thoroughly manipulated as Wrestlemania. Which doesn’t make any show inherently better or worse than any other – there is room in my brain for thought-provoking cultural anthropology alongside skanks and sleazy producers engaged in an on-camera battle of dim wits. The latest case I’ve been trying to wrap my head around is LA Ink, where Kat’s brother hired a new receptionist for the tattoo parlor while Kat was out of town, and despite the fact that the receptionist sucks at her job and annoys the artists, Kat hasn’t fired her. This gives the show a little more drama except that it is also phony as hell and reeks of producer interference. And to weird it up even more, the receptionist is Aubrey from Rock of Love (I forget which season) whose resume objective is obviously not so much “work as a receptionist in a tattoo parlor” as “work any job at a workplace that is featured on a reality show so I can get more camera time.” And honestly, in early-21st-Century America, Microsoft might as well include a resume template in Word that has that objective already filled in, I’m over that, but if Kat were really the artsy rebel she portrays herself to be wouldn’t camera-whoring be adequate reason to fire someone as well? Kat slides farther from Anthony Bourdain and more towards Bret Michaels every time I catch her show.
But wait, I was talking about The Biggest Loser, which never misses an opportunity to be an exemplar of the reality competition system. The show owns what it is and I am fully on board with this. Everybody lives together in a ridiculously pimped out complex (The Ranch) within walking distance of a full gym, so right there we have left the realm most of us recognize as “reality.” Then there’s the elaborate rules of the game. Instead of simply eliminating the contestant with the lowest percentage of weight loss each week, they give the decision to the other contestants to choose between the bottom two, so you get the elements of drama like Strategy, Alliances, Roll Call Votes, Feuds With Scores To Settle, and suchlike. They intercut the week’s activities with straight-to-the-camera confessionals just so you don’t have to think too hard to follow this week’s shocking developments.
The weigh-ins are just a masterclass in constructing artificial tension. First there’s a the scenario itself: if you can imagine yourself stripped to your shorts (ladies add a sports bra) and standing in front of a dozen other people and then getting on a scale that everyone else can read and then talking a bit about the number that comes up before being allowed to step down and put a shirt on, AND while imagining this you are not FREAKING OUT, then I salute your robust self-esteem. Second, this is not just any scale, this is a Crazy Roulette Scale where instead of stepping on and getting one number, you step on and get a random assortment of numbers that eventually settles on your weight. 290! 310! 285! 303! 261! 768! All accompanied by dramatic music. And occasionally, the numbers will still be randomizing, and the camera will cut away just when the “final number” sound effect hits, and we’ll get some reaction shots from the rest of the group and/or the weighee, clearly disbelief but is it happy disbelief or agonizing disbelief …? And we’ll cut to commercial. I can only imagine network executives saying “OK, we like this idea for a weight loss reality competition, but stepping on a scale is pretty boring for tv. Punch that part up.” And the showrunners punched the hell out of it.
Here’s the thing, though. You can create fake tension in the Top Chef kitchen by cherry-picking your confessionals and heavily editing the rest of the footage. You can run the Mantracker chase by one set of rules and then film recreated footage to fill in the gaps and the audience will either buy it or they won’t. And you can stage The Biggest Loser to be as overly dramatic as you please but what you can’t fake is people actually losing weight. Believe me, however many years ago the show first debuted, I was highly dismissive of it (what could be more boring than a diet show?) but when I finally watched I realized that people actually losing weight fascinate me.
I could stand to lose ten or twenty pounds. I’ve been dealing with my weight (poorly) ever since I was a little kid, for reasons which are not terribly deep: I love food and I don’t particularly like exercise. Food makes me happy. I tend to eat something because I’m craving its flavor way more often than I eat something because, y’know, I’m actually hungry or anything. I’ve actually learned over the past few years that exercise makes me feel good, but it’s never going to be something I have a passion for. If I think about the good things exercise will do for me, and the bad things that will probably happen if I don’t work out, then I can just about scrape together the motivation to hit the gym. I use a similar strategy to talk myself out of indulging in unhealthy food – benefits of skipping Chipotle and cost of cramming it in my face – and my success rate is similarly so-so. And I know none of this makes me a particularly unique case. Who wouldn’t rather eat much and eat well and hang out and relax than count calories on your plate and on the treadmill?
So maybe I’m just stating the obvious to make it clear that yes, indeed, sometimes when I watch The Biggest Loser I project a little. I’m not morbidly obese and I’m not at risk of dropping dead tomorrow (I hope) but I identify with the contestants on some level. I watch a lot of reality shows for the schadenfreude but The Biggest Loser is not in that category. The contestants all seem like decent people and I don’t begrudge any of them the (admittedly unrealistic) professional help they are getting to improve their lives, or the fact that they’re doing so on television. I wouldn’t exactly call The Biggest loser an inspiration, but it is compelling for me. And it keeps me out of the kitchen at a time of night when I would be most likely to be snacking just because I’m bored, alone and watching tv. In and of itself that makes it a Tuesday night lock for me.
Finally, in keeping with the “junk food is the enemy!” theme, here is an awesome tribute to the arcade classic Burgertime:
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