Last night was the most blatant instance so far this season (and maybe ever, but again, I only started watching the show last season) of pushing a good-guy/bad-guy narrative. Tracey was once again cast as the bad-guy, so it’s not as if it came out of nowhere, but …
Let me back up. The Biggest Loser is a reality competition show in the very familiar last-man-standing mold. Every season has a winner who gets something like a $250,000 cash prize – I’m not entirely sure because as far as I’m concerned that is basically beside the point. The real point is that a bunch of people who are dangerously overweight get the chance to learn how to get healthy, how to eat right, how to exercise, how to manage their lives differently than they have before. Ostensibly they learn this all right at the beginning in massive cram sessions, so that even someone eliminated the first week can go home armed with new skills and abilities and continue losing weight on their own (and there’s an “at home winner” prize awarded at the reunion finale to keep them motivated, too). It’s an interesting twist on the game theory because it truly is in each individual’s best interest to stay on the show as long as possible – not, as I’ve said before, so they can have more screentime to extend their fifteen minutes of fame, and not because the longer one stays in the pool the greater one’s chances of winning the grand prize, but simply because people tend to lose more weight more quickly while they are on the show than when they go home. On the ranch, their food is always bought, paid for and as healthy as possible, and they have access to a full gym and two kick-ass trainers and no responsibilities except working out and participating in “challenges”. A contestant who fails to win it all but lasts until late in the season gets more benefit than a person who departs earlier in the season. So to the extent that people on TBL agonize about whether or not they are going to be sent home, the vast majority of the time they could care less about the money and they just wish they could have one more week of ranch living.
Personally, I think the show would be just as compelling and watchable if no one ever got eliminated, and all 16 contestants weighed in on-campus every single week, and in the end whoever had lost the most weight won the cash. I assume the producers think differently and assume that without the drama of a weekly elimination the ratings would be lower. Maybe so, but whether I’m right or the producers are, the rules of the game are what they are.
So, enter Tracey, the overweight mom who is bound and determined to win the money game at any cost. In the very first episode the contestants had to footrace a mile down a beach, and the reward for winning the race was immunity from elimination. Tracey was so dead set on winning the immunity, she sprinted down the beach as hard as she could and basically sent her entire body into shock, collapsed, went to the hospital, and still some five weeks later is not medically cleared to work out as hard as the other contestants. Still, that misfortune did not stop her from rapidly earning a reputation for gamesmanship when she got back to the ranch. Given the opportunity to sacrifice working out with the trainers in exchange for a 2 pound bonus at weigh-in, she jumped at it (and by her own admission it was a move calculated mainly to keep that bonus out of other competitors’ hands). Next came a temptation challenge, and this one was about as subtle as a medieval morality play. Whoever ate the most junk food (while unable to see everyone else and gauge how much it would take to do so) would gain an advantage at weigh-in. This is baaaaaaaad behavior and, unsurprisingly, Tracey won. Again, forbidden to work out, the only thing Tracey can do to lose weight is watch what she eats. But she’s not there to lose weight as much as she is to WIN THE GAME, and of course she has to lose weight to win in the end (although whether or not she realizes this is highly debatable), but she can improve her odds of someone else losing by winning power-oriented challenges. The power advantage was revealed: normally all the contestants are paired off and pairs weigh in together for a cumulative percentage-of-body-weight-lost, and the low-achievers are up for elimination. Because of this, a contestant doing really well can keep their low-achieving partner safe. Tracey’s “prize” was that only one member of each partner pair would weigh in and Tracey would choose which one. Which really isn’t a prize at all, just a guaranteed way to get everyone to hate you, but she won it by eating the most junk food – the thudding feeling on your forehead is the show’s heavy-handedness wielding its message mallet.
Everyone was gunning for Tracey after that, especially because she pulled the classic reality-show-villain move of solicitously asking everyone what they thought she should do, promising some of them she would help them, and then doing the opposite of what she said she would and screwing everyone over. Now of course at this point we start to get into the power of editing. A good villain on a reality show is priceless, so it’s certainly in the producers’ interests to put Tracey in that role. I believe she gives them a lot of raw material to work with, but the true extent to which she lies to people’s faces is obscured by the fact that the contestants live together 24-7 and I only get to see eighty-four minutes of footage a week. But those eighty-four minutes taken out of any other ameliorating context are pretty rough.
Then there’s the other side of the coin, the saints to Tracey’s devil. One is Coach Mo, Tracey’s partner. He just seems like a genuinely nice guy, a grandfather who loves his family and works with kids, you can’t help but root for him. He’s mellow and wise and compared to him, Tracey looks even more like a psychopath. But the real saint of Season Eight is Abby. Abby’s experiences at the ranch haven’t been terribly memorable but her backstory is excruciating. Seriously, brace yourself for this: she’s 35, was married and had a 5 year old girl and a newborn son, and the husband and both kids were killed in a car accident three years ago. (It was literally physically difficult to type that last sentence. I hope you were braced.) Of course my heart goes out to Abby and I just want her to succeed, in fact I want life to be good to her in every possible way. She really seems like an interesting person in terms of how she deals with and talks about her grief; when other contestants say things like “If I don’t lose this weight I might literally die” she understands where they’re coming from but also explains that for her, dying would be easy, and she’s not trying to lose weight to avoid death but to do something meaningful with her life. And in a strange twist of fate, she managed to give herself a stress fracture so when the whole cast does physical challenges there’s always two people sitting on the sidelines for medical reasons: crazy evil scheming Tracey, and beatific Zen master Abby. Just the way it all worked out, but man – you can’t write this stuff.
So, speaking of the unwriteable, last night’s installment. It starts with a game of chance: spin the wheel, lift the silver dome on the platter (one of thirty-two) that stops in front of the pointer. Eat what’s on the platter, which might be a 100 calorie cookie or a 1,000 calorie slice of cake. Or … it might be the Golden Ticket which gives its bearer the right to choose the new teams as the show transitions from color-coded pairs to two tribes of six. Participating in the game of chance was optional. Remember how the last game that involved eating junkfood and awarded the winner egregious amounts of power over the other contestants turned out? Can you guess who opted out of the game? (If you guessed Saint Abby, ding ding ding.) Everyone else played, but not everyone even got a spin of the wheel, because on turn four or five, Tracey found the Golden Ticket. She then proceeded to create teams as follows: she kept herself and her partner Coach Mo together and kept Daniel and Shay, the two youngest and heaviest contestants, together; everyone else got split up, which seemed like pure malice. Tracey wanting to put the more athletic guys on her own team makes sense, but the girls she kept had no strategic value other than being partners with people who ended up on the other team. And of course, Tracey cried crocodile tears the whole time about the fact that she HAD TO split up those teams. The rest of the episode went about as you’d expect: a physical challenge was dominated by Tracey’s team of ringers, the weigh-in came down to the wire but the underdog team actually had the better numbers, which set up a showdown between Tracey and her four teammates who were pissed about being forcibly separated from their partners.
At that point, with about fifteen minutes left in the episode, the producers totally overplayed their hands. In the span of less than a minute three people’s confessionals were intercut with all of them saying “Tracey’s going home.” Which would effectively render the final segment of the show superfluous, and if you’ve ever watched reality TV (or, like me, if you watch waaaaaay too much) you know that’s just not allowed. What really happened was that Coach Mo fell on his sword and convinced the rest of the team to send him home and keep Tracey around, and they acquiesced.
The reason I can’t stop thinking about all of this is that it all seems suspiciously convenient. The crux of the whole episode was Tracey winning the Golden Ticket, of course, and the odds of that happening spontaneously are ridiculously small. It’s a little bit cynical, but not tinfoil-hat paranoid, to harbor a feeling that just maybe the “game of chance” was rigged and Tracey was allowed to win the ticket because she was the one manipulative lunatic on campus who would sue it to stir up the most drama. But if that kind of outright deception is going on behind the scenes, what else? Did the producers force Abby to opt out of the game because that’s her contrasting archetype role? Did they encourage Mo to take a bullet for Tracey so their Big Bad could continue to be a thorn in everyone’s side? Did they fudge the numbers on the Frigging Crazy Roulette Scales to make Tracey’s team lose? Is that why they use a Frigging Crazy Roulette Scale in the first place???
I like The Biggest Loser for many reasons but a big one is because I assume that it is mostly real, with a little bit of ratings-goosing sprinkled on top. If it turned out that it was a lot more fake than I believe, that would seriously bum me out. I hope I’m wrong, but man, one more improbable serendipity that gives Evil Mastermind Tracey the ultimate screwjob power and I will be forced to conclude that I’ve been utterly played.
No comments:
Post a Comment