Review – The Biggest Loser: Families
The Biggest Loser: Families – Ten – 6:30pm Sunday/7:30pm Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – AUS
Before I sat down to watch Channel 10’s The Biggest Loser: Families I’d never seen an entire episode of the show before. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I can’t watch television where fat people cry, I am one of the few people who have inexplicably watched an entire season of the terrible Losing It With Jillian, which is nothing but fat people crying. It’s just that even with my regrettably full reality show diet I just had no room for something like The Biggest Loser. That was until this season when Channel 10 and their marketing department turned The Biggest Loser: Families into must see TV.
I tell you what, the folks making the ads over at Channel 10 are damn good at what they do. Outside of The Biggest Loser, their ads for Hawaii Five-0 and Blue Bloods make both those shows look fantastic, and this is despite the fact that I’ve actually seen both those shows and know for a fact that they’re not good at all. Making bad TV look good, nobody does that quite like Channel 10. Making bad TV look worse, that’s what Channel 9’s for. Interestingly, Channel 7 can make good TV look terrible.
The hook for this season of The Biggest Loser is that the four trainers are each assigned a family and they have to live with that family for a week. The trainers will have to eat everything that the families eat. And they can only exercise when the families exercise. How great an idea is that? Or at least it would be a great idea if it wasn’t wrapped up and tossed away by the end of the first episode so the show can get back to humiliating fat people the old fashioned way.
The newest trainer Tiffiny joins the three Biggest Loser veterans; Shannon, Michelle and The Commando. Shannon was fairly forgettable in the first episode, and Michelle got to sit around making disgusting faces at all the fat people. The Commando is such a ridiculous reality show creation that it’s hard to continuously refer to him as The Commando without feeling like a tool. Meanwhile new girl Tiffiny was both annoying and moronic, which is the ultimate combo to look for when trying to find somebody to inspire you to better health.
On her first night Tiffiny’s family had the gall to feed her a chicken parma and beer. At least when Michelle was forced to scoff down cream and frankfurts she had every reason to barf, but it’s just a parma, Tiffiny, calm down; thin people even sometimes eat those things. Although, it was good for a laugh when she tearfully told the camera that they’d forced her to “drink all night and eat a chicken parmigiana”, as if there was a gun to her head.
The Biggest Loser really lets itself down in a couple of areas. I’m not a reality TV show hater by any means, and I think that the ‘but it’s not real!’ argument is ridiculous but boy did The Biggest Loser feel fake. Now, I know that when I watch Survivor that no matter how many dangerous animals they show us between scenes that the chances of a python springing forth and strangling Russell is, sadly, never going to happen. I also know on The Amazing Race that when the final two teams are in a close race to the finish that I’m not witnessing a tight competition but just frantic editing. I know this, but I can still enjoy the show. Yet on The Biggest Loser, which was not showing us a globe-hopping adventure and was just showing us people in their homes, I was never convinced that the trainers really did live with their families for a week.
The disbelief kicked in early as the trainers walked up to host Hayley Lewis who gave them their mission. You have to live with the family for a week, and eat what they eat. Shock horror! Oh no! Unbelievable! This is completing shocking news to me that I was not expecting. Unfortunately none of the trainers are very good actors. Same as for when the contestants got the exciting news that a Biggest Loser trainer was coming to see them, as if there wasn’t a camera crew in their kitchen and a Biggest Loser phone waiting for them on the table. From there on the first episode rushed from Day 1 to Day 5 without letting us spend too much time with one family before moving to the next. For over a month they’ve been promising us the trainers living with their families and it was over before it had even really begun.
The show didn’t even try very hard to convince us that the trainers really did live with the families. Oh, they said that they lived there, and we definitely saw them have two meals at each house, but outside of Tiffiny being there for a 3:30pm breakfast and Michelle going to work with one of her lads there wasn’t a lot of ‘living with the family’ going on. They didn’t even show one of the trainers going to “their room”. From the fake shock of the trainers to the brief glimpses of ‘life with the families’ it’s hard to believe the reality that The Biggest Loser is trying to sell us.
I don’t mind when a show fudges the truth to sell its story, but the trainers living with their family was the story. What The Biggest Loser delivered wasn’t the trainers living with the families, it was exactly the same ‘oh so this is your life, is this what you eat, are you now crying?’ package these shows always dish out. Not that it matters much anymore, they’ve already ditched that storyline. It’s back to business. Next episode we have a humiliating weigh in where the fat people have to stand in their underwear in front of their closest friends and family (which I’m sure the friends and family will be so pleased to see…) and coming soon FAT PEOPLE PULL TRAINS. Which you just know will be filled with all the tears and embarrassment that encouraged me not to watch this show in the first place.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
