Ragen Chastain (who is one of the most awesome people I know) has a post on her blog about The Biggest Loser. She is not a fan.

The Biggest Loser has named a new champion.  Rachel Frederickson won the show by losing 60% of her body weight, going from 260 pounds to 105 pounds. This is a Biggest Loser Record. She lost the most and so she walked away with $250,000 because TBL is a game show wherein people manipulate their body size for money. It’s not a health show, it’s a game show. A terrible, terrible game show. [Emphasis added.]

Most reality shows—well, the ones that don’t consist of cameras following minor celebrities or “real” people around and waiting for them to get into pointless fights with each other—are really just glorified game shows. I’m not knocking game shows. I’ve enjoyed a few game shows, and I admire that they admit that they are, in fact, game shows. Not so much with shows like The Biggest Loser, which seems to me, based on the little I’ve seen of it, to be entirely about people deemed overweight who volunteer to be abused on television by obnoxious exercise buffs.

The Biggest Loser uses the concept of health as an incentive, a smokescreen, and profit generator.  They use threats about, and promises of, health to convince fat people to be physically and mentally abused for profit.  They use the idea that they abuse fat people “for our own good to make us healthy” to help their audiences justify watching the physical and emotional abuse for entertainment.

Honestly, we are nearing the point Stephen King wrote about in his novella The Running Man, which was adapted almost beyond recognition for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The film didn’t get into the politics of its society as much as the novella, but they both dealt with forms of entertainment that passed any and all bounds of ethics or even decency. The point of the titular program was to kill the contestant, but other shows were content merely to torture them, put them at risk of death, or exhibit remarkable indifference to their well-being. Page 2 of the book introduces the show Treadmill to Bucks.

Half-time was over, and the game was on again. This wasn’t one of the big ones, of course, just a cheap daytime come-on called Treadmill to Bucks. They accepted only chronic heart, liver, or lung patients, sometimes throwing in a crip for comic relief. Every minute the contestant could stay on the treadmill (keeping up a steady flow of chatter with the emcee), he won ten dollars. Every two minutes the emcee asked a Bonus Question in the contestant’s category (the current pal, a heart-murmur from Hackensack, was an American history buff) which was worth fifty dollars. If the contestant, dizzy, out of breath, heart doing fantastic rubber acrobatics in his chest, missed the question, fifty dollars was deducted from his winnings and the treadmill was speeded up.

The book was not subtle. Neither was the movie, which gave us Climbing for Dollars.

Today, we have The Biggest Loser.

Photo credit: By Courtney Szto [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.