Yes, it’s my obligatory post-finale thoughts on The Biggest Loser. It’s still kind of strange to me how quickly I soured on the whole show towards the end, yet despite my own personal disappointments and the perfect storm of some news articles appearing right around the end of the season which highlighted how the BL approach of losing as much weight as possible as fast as possible is really non-sustainable (and potentially harmful) I still found the entire spectacle compulsively watchable and found myself glued to last night’s two-hour live closing ceremonies. Since I continue to be conflicted about the overall value of the show, all I can do now is distill it to its essence as a competition and say (not that anyone cares) that I am pleased with the results. As I was pretty sure she would, Rebecca won the at-home prize, so good for her. Rudy and Liz, who had both shown some dispiriting jerkiness as the season went along, got their semi-comeuppance: Liz by losing the top-3 vote to Amanda, and Rudy by coming in second in the top-3, where there is no prize for runner-up. Crazy-eyed Okie Danny won the whole fat-free enchilada, and I’m OK with that because he seems like a nice enough guy, albeit amusingly delusional.
In the penultimate episode the Final Four had to run a marathon and Danny kept saying in various confessional-cam interviews that a marathon was THE most grueling physical endurance test a person can go through. You would think after the first time he made that claim, a production assistant would have patted his head and told him that there are hyper-marathons and iron man marathons and all sorts of other competitions that are in fact more grueling than a traditional marathon, not to mention non-competitive stuff like training to be a Navy SEAL or climbing Mount Everest. But no, Danny kept right on claiming that marathons were where human physical exertion maxed out, just like all season he kept claiming that because he had a mullet and played bass in a garage band in high school that he was a “rock star”. Ah, but like I said, he seems like a sweetheart, and he won $250K for dropping 55% of his body weight, so more power to him.
There were some other nice codas – good to see Saint Abby again, touching to see Antoine propose to Alex on live tv, kinda cool that Subway is going to essentially pay Shay to lose more weight, because, let us not forget, Shay is the poor one – but really it was just what I expected. Which I’m sure is what the producers strive for, because after eight seasons they’ve got their hooks in the audience and aren’t about to shake anyone loose.
Of course I’ll end up watching Season 9 (and subjecting all of you to my thoughts on it, especially as the season will extend past the Superbowl and basically become my ‘sport’ of choice in late winter) and I think I’m going to track all of the blatant product placement, in-episode commercials for sponsors, and real commercials for the BL empire of products, just for my own amusement. The new season is only four weeks away – no rust growing on those hooks! It looked from the previews at first like it was going to be “TBL – Lonely Hearts” because all the participants were talking about how they’d never had a boyfriend/girlfriend/relationship … but so far they’re calling it “TBL Couples” so … um … I’ll have to decipher that come January.
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