'Fit for TV' and Making America the Biggest Loser

Netflix recently released the documentary1 Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser. For those even vaguely aware of the reality series The Biggest Loser, perhaps a documentary “exposing” the show seems unnecessary. A show where fat people were supposed to drop weight rapidly in order to “win,” may not have been the best way to model a healthy lifestyle. Of course, I used to think people understood that reality TV had little to do with reality and then they went and elected a business failure because he played a successful businessman on TV. More often than not, people sometimes do just buy what they’re being sold and don’t interrogate that entertainment produced for a broad audience has its own incentives.

But watching Fit for TV, we’re left to wonder, “Why would people watch this in the first place?” The producers wanted to package the show as inspirational. The contestants wanted to “take control” of their lives, and they were willing to workout like crazy to rapidly drop weight. And then they’d be skinny, which is what our society values. Sure, there are some health benefits, but more importantly: skinny! Look how skinny! Okay, that’s too skinny, but hey, who could have foreseen. So wasn’t it uplifting that these fat slobs were finally hopping on a treadmill? And when they get tired, the trainers were here to yell at them! That’s motivation. That’s what these losers were missing: someone verbally abusing them, because if there’s one thing we know about fat people, it’s that society is too nice to them.

When you watch a bunch of Biggest Loser clips in a row as Fit for TV presents, you can see not only how this is in no way healthy, but that health and fitness are not the goals here. The goal is entertainment, but more importantly, a certain kind of entertainment. What cavalier producers David Broome and J. D. Roth as well as horribly glib trainer Bob Harper convey is that they were making “good television.” It’s almost axiomatic that watching trainers yell at fat people, having fat people puke from working out too hard, and having the fat people backstab each other over prize money, is inherently entertaining. But…why?

The underlying thesis is that conflict is what makes entertaining television. You have two opposing forces, and you set them against each other. It’s what has qualified as entertainment since we threw gladiators together in the coliseum. The more blood you draw, the more the audience will eat it up. Suffering is the currency in the realm, and the greater the suffering, the greater the victory. It’s a perverse depiction of the idea that the hardest work leads to the greatest outcome, but you can only emphasize that hard work by defeating another. Victory means nothing without a conquered foe.

The Biggest Loser pretended that the conquered foe was extra pounds, but the real enemy is the existence of fat people. Viewers aren’t really supposed to root for the contestants, and if anything, could turn against them as they tried to play “the game” aspect just so they could stick around a little longer to lose more weight. Viewers are ultimately rooting for the trainers just as they would root for Trump to say his catchphrase, “You’re fired.” What viewers were really tuning in for wasn’t inspirational success, but the expression of abuse and cruelty. There is a person who has failed in some way, and we need the polished, camera-friendly star (the person who will never leave the show, and thus becomes the person we connect to above any contestant) to properly punish them.