Review – Excess Baggage

Excess Baggage – Nine – 7:00pm Weeknights – AUS

Channel 9’s decision to resurrect their ratings by stripping a variety of reality shows across the 7pm timeslot is a clever idea, even if it’s an idea they borrowed from Ten. This creates a strong base at the beginning of the night from which to launch the rest of their line-up. The only problem with this idea is that in order to fill so many hours of television Nine are going to end up with half-thought out programs like Excess Baggage. Excess Baggage feels like a television show made up on the fly by a network that have found themselves with fifty nights to fill and nothing to fill them with. Excess Baggage isn’t the worst reality show Nine have ever produced but it’s still hard to justify spending that amount of time with a show this unfulfilling.

Excess Baggage assembles eight overweight celebrities and pairs them up with an overweight everyday Aussie to call their own. Over ten weeks these couples will compete in challenges and attempt to not just lose weight but to better themselves, or something like that anyway. It’s a hard enough task for a reality series to gather together actual celebrities to do things like sit in a boardroom or dance but to find overweight people who also qualify as celebrities is an almost impossible task. The “big names“ assembled for Excess Baggage include Dipper, Christine Anu, Australian Idol winner Kate DeAraugo, Gabby Millgate who is literally famous for saying one line in one movie nearly two decades ago, some tool who calls himself Mr. Paparazzi, one of the Beaconsfield miners, Ajay Rochester the former host of The Biggest Loser, and Britney Spears’s ex-husband Kevin Federline.

It isn’t a bad line-up of celebrities considering it couldn’t have been easy to find somebody who was not only famous but also overweight and then also willing to appear in a reality show that reminds them how overweight they are. Some contestants like Christine Anu and Dipper are likeable but the rest are deeply unpleasant in this first hour of television. A few of the contestants are designed that way, Mr. Paparazzi is a massive cock but then that’s why the show hired him in the first place. Ajay Rochester also seems to have an axe to grind with her former employer as she doesn’t seem to speak to camera unless she wants to bad mouth that rival weight-loss program.

While Mr. Paparazzi may be purposefully acting like a jerk just because he understands that he’s on a reality TV show and all reality TV shows need a villain, at least he serves a purpose which is more than can be said for at least two of the other celebrities. Brant Webb is famous for being rescued from being stuck down a mine and lacks anything resembling a personality. Every time he reappeared I just assumed he was one of the ‘regular’ folks. The saddest of the bunch surprisingly isn’t K-Fed, who actually comes across as fairly laidback and likeable, but rather Gabby Millgate who depressingly seems to hang her entire existence on that time she said “you’re terrible Muriel” in Muriel’s Wedding. When Gabby steps off the bus to meet the others she spews her catchphrase as if she can see on their faces they have no idea who she is. Is it any wonder she spends her nights eating microwaved cheese?

There’s no real point getting to know the everyday Australians who make up the other half of the teams because this first episode does such a poor job of establishing who they are or who they’re teamed up with. The introductions of these contestants are scattered across the first hour almost as if the show kept forgetting that it had more people to introduce only to remember midway through an unrelated scene. The contestants are your standard issue types who want to lose weight so they can get back to living their life. You’ve seen weight loss programs and you’ve seen the types of people who go on weight loss programs, now imagine those people teamed up with some other people you may recognize and you’ve got this show.

The problem Channel 9 have when it comes to reality television is that they don’t understand how to structure an episode of reality TV. You saw this all the time with The Block last year when contestants in a renovation show would spend an entire episode running from one sponsor to the next looking for little red houses as if that was somehow related to the basic premise of the show. Excess Baggage has that exact problem. The episode opens with the contestants teaming up and going on a ‘Spirit Walk’. No kidding, we got to watch these people WALK around for at least half an hour. The show calls this part of the experience a ‘Spirit Challenge’ but there are no winners and losers it’s all about bonding or some nonsense. It doesn’t matter what you call it – it’s still just people walking around.

Excess Baggage’s mission statement is ‘we want you to change you’. There are no set diets, there is no lockdown, it is about teaching the contestants to take control of their weight not simply by depriving them of food. This is an admirable philosophy if it wasn’t so obviously designed simply to have a point of difference from The Biggest Loser. Everything about Excess Baggage is a reaction to another program. The reason the celebrities are teamed up with everyday people instead of going it on their own is so that people don’t make comparisons to Nine’s failed celebrity weight loss show Celebrity Overhaul. The reason they don’t just use a weigh-in to judge their progress is in response to the way The Biggest Loser does things. They have Ajay Rochester mouthing off about how full of crap The Biggest Loser is every five minutes, simply to convince you of how evil that competing television show is, not because they think this makes for interesting television.

Excess Baggage isn’t a terrible reality competition but it’s an uninteresting and poorly made one. Everything that happens in Excess Baggage feels as though it’s been thought up on the spot – oh, and now, I guess, we’re going to be doing some push-ups here in the grass. It feels rushed into production and haphazardly slapped together in order to meet a deadline not in order to entertain an audience. This show isn’t a lost cause necessarily but they need to do more than have contestants go on walks if they want to keep viewers hooked. Channel 9 have been responsible for some pretty awful reality shows these last few years, as anybody who has flashbacks to Australia’s Perfect Couple will happily remind you, but Excess Baggage is oddly one their better series despites still being a massive waste of time.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad