Review – Losing It With Jillian

Losing It With Jillian – NBC – 10:00/9:00pm Tuesday – USA

Jillian Michaels is a personal trainer on the US version of The Biggest Loser. She looks and acts like an angry Paula Abdul, and as her new series Losing It With Jillian opens she lets us know that she’s ‘leaving the Biggest Loser ranch and making house calls’. And we’re left wondering if calling it the Biggest Loser ‘ranch’ is really the right way to go? Ranch? As in where you keep cattle? Of all the things you put those fat people through, telling them you keep them on a ranch must be the hardest.

Losing It With Jillian lets us know that there are a lot of fat families out there in America and they need Jillian’s help. In the first episode we met the Mastropietros family from Boston, who all have that wonderful broad Boston accent that makes everything they yell sound hilarious. This fat family loves food. This fat family is also sad and unhealthy. You suspect that each week we’re going to meet a fat, sad, unhealthy family. Luckily Jillian is here to help these people lose weight – presumably through the shedding of tears.

The family are all excited to meet Jillian and she’s excited to meet them. So excited that when she first meets them in a gym, she yells at them for hours whilst making them do exercise. Jillian has this way about her where everything she says sounds like it should end with ‘motherf*cker’. “I’ve got news for you Jimbo, if it was okay I wouldn’t be here… motherf*cker.” “No Agnes, I’m not killing you, you’re killing you… motherf*cker.” “You think change is easy, it’s not easy…motherf*cker.” Jillian berates these fat people for not riding exercise bikes fast enough, or not doing enough push-ups, or, in the strangest moment, not pulling Jillian along the gym floor as she holds onto a giant elastic band she’s wrapped around Jimbo’s waist.

Jillian throws stuff around, she yells at everybody. She yells at this family so much that they start yelling at each other. When people aren’t yelling on this show, they’re crying and Jillian manages to find every way possible to make this fat family cry. They cry while they’re at the gym, Jillian takes the daughter to the supermarket to show her what fruit is and makes her cry. Jillian goes for a walk with the mum, and makes her cry. They cry alone, they cry in public, they cry at dinner. The family even has a Jillian inspired chat about their dead son and everybody cries, even Jillian. It feels like the ‘It’ they’re ‘Losing With Jillian’ is their minds.

Jillian treats this family like she’s Gordan Ramsey and they’re a shitty restaurant. I’m sure there’s somebody who could find a correlation between the teaching techniques of Jillian and other reality show ‘yellers’ and the average American not being able to take in any information unless it’s being yelled directly into their faces. At one point Jillian yells at the previously fat, now thin daughter “Let go of that fat kid, let her go!” in one of many moments where Jillian’s words could be taken out of context and sound as though they’re being screamed by a rogue hero cop in a kidnapping thriller starring Ashley Judd.

Losing It With Jillian leaves me completely torn. On the one hand I’m human and respond to humanity, and to its credit the show manages to create a rather full portrait of this family and the tragedy that is their obesity, and where that obesity stems from. On the other hand we have Jillian’s angry face popping up to yell at everybody as if to remind us we’re in a stupid reality show. The family side of things is handled better than on equally naff shows like Wife Swap or Kitchen Nightmares, but all that yelling at fat people and forcing them to do stuff they don’t want to do left me almost as uncomfortable as the time I watched Hostel; this is torture-porn with fat people.

Jillian speaks in nothing but buzz-words and cliché, and despite the bleeding heart humanity of the whole thing there’s also that awful reality show sheen to the proceedings. The family are trying to lose weight for the daughter’s wedding, so naturally Jillian gets invited along to the big day and in one revolting moment even gives a speech. “Hey remember when that angry lady yelled at us for being fat, and then remember when she spoke at our wedding?” Losing It With Jillian is either ‘Alright’ or ‘Ugly’ – there’s no real in between with this show, so it’s not ‘Bad’. It left me feeling something, but I sense that feeling was ‘repulsion’ and not ‘inspiration’. I think I’m going to have to award my first ever mutant score.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright but it can get Ugly.