I actually thought we got off easy last night, though, as the last thing I remembered before the alarm went off at 5 a.m. was turning off the Orange Bowl. The recent (possibly/probably) teething-related sleeplessness of our boy has been an every night thing and I’ve been trying to maintain my conviction that a corner is about to be turned any day, and that he was still totally capable of sleeping through the night, and lo.
Me, this morning: “Well, at least the baby slept through the night.”
My Wife: “Actually, he woke up and cried a little after midnight.”
Me: “Oh … did you have to get up?”
My Wife: “Yeah, but only for fifteen minutes. He actually went back down really well.”
Me: “Ah. I guess I slept through all that.”
And there have been nights where getting up with the baby means staying up for close to two hours, so by that measure we did in fact get off easy last night, and one of us had to take one for the team last night in any case, and maybe the next time piercing cries split the quiet of a Tuesday night I will be shaken awake (because somehow the cries themselves don’t penetrate my sleep) and sent stumbling down the hall myself, and yet. I always feel like a bit of a jerkface when I sleep through a middle-of-the-night incident, however minor.
Meanwhile (or, perhaps better, Previously) … on the Ranch … The Biggest Loser is back and continues its inevitable slide into “huh, that show used to be good.” Season 9 lacks a Crazy Tracey or a Saint Abby of its own (so far) and seems instead to simply be focused on finding contestants who are, as the name of the show would seem to dictate, bigger. I believe the technical term once you’ve gone right past “morbidly obese” would be “grotesquely obese”. Whatever it says about me as a compassionate (or not) human being, the identical twin brothers who weighed 485 lbs. each never failed to make me think of a carnival sideshow whenever they were on screen. There just comes a point where, for all the good TBL does (and I still believe it does, maybe not as much as it puffs itself up for, but some good) it can’t … um … outweigh … the exploitation factor of putting people up on television who are not just heavy but Holy Jeebus Heavy. This is somewhat discomfiting. The fact that this season began with the contestants forced to submit to public, town square initial weigh-ins did nothing to dispel the carney music floating through my head.
Did I mention the twins aren’t even the heaviest dudes this season? Enter Michael, topping the scales at 525-ish lbs. As he himself put it, he could lose a whole person’s worth of weight – even an overweight person’s weight – and he would still be overweight. Which might seem overtly self-evident, but it’s perspective, which seems to be getting rarer as the show chugs through season after season and so many of the contestants are also self-identified super-fans who think once they meet the trainers all their problems will be solved.
I know I sound like I’m doing nothing but bashing the show and that really that should make me reckon with why exactly I would devote two hours a week to it, but it still has its appeal, even as it pushes my irritable buttons. Case-in-point being the season opener’s requisite heavily edited rap session scene where all the contestants open up about their previous struggles. Never been kissed/never been in love was a pretty common theme, and I’m certainly not one to scoff at loneliness, but I do, of course, scoff at poor self-expression, like Daris trying to gin up maximum pathos by saying “I have never had a girlfriend, in my entire life.” Indeed, “never” usually encompasses all of the applicable time periods a statement could be contextualized in, but thanks for being redundantly specific, D-Man. (That’s actually an old pet peeve of mine. There was a jewelry store commercial on the radio a few years back where the customer attested that “Buying an engagement ring was the most important decision I had made in my life so far to this point.” I SWEAR TO CRAP. And it was trying to sound off the cuff yet transparently scripted, which means someone got paid to write out that quadruple-redundancy. That commercial used to make me want to unload a .44 into my dashboard.) Oh, and Daris is 25 years old, which makes the whole “my entire life” bit that much better. Ah, well. Who am I to begrudge someone a little effort to make their personal trials and tribulations appear as epic as possible?
On that note, that’s probably enough snark at the expense of the obese for now. Oh, but can I snark about the trappings of the show itself a little more? Obviously TBL is rigidly formulaic (despite the constant assault of promised “surprises”) and you could go blind trying to count all the times Alison Sweeney says “Your current weight is” or “stay above that yellow line” in a given episode. Which is why, if I were to devise a TBL drinking game, I would probably make the trigger phrases slightly less ingrained. More along the lines of “we/you have our/your work cut out for us/you” or “to go home now would be … DEVASTATING”. If I had been playing exactly that drinking game last night, I would have been WASTED by 10 p.m. Which would have taken the sting out of the fact that I was cruelly deprived of a “This season on The Biggest loser!” montage. Those are always my favorite part of any reality show season premiere. So, boo.
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