Joshua Alston: More To Love, Less To Say: The Problem With TV's New Weight-Based Reality Shows

Tonight, Fox’s premieres More to Love, a reality dating competition best described as The Bachelor for the “traditionally built.” Luke Conley, 26, is the eligible hottie, a 330-pound real-estate broker who is looking for love. In his introduction, he talks about the difficulty he’s had finding romance because of his weight. But perhaps his fortunes will change when he meets the 20 Rubenesque beauties vying for his attention. “I’ve always been more attracted to more voluptuous, curvy women,” Luke says. “They just have more fun in life.” When the women start popping out of a limo to greet their potential prince, for a moment, Luke’s theory seems to bear out. The women seem vivacious, spunky, and totally comfortable in their skin.

But just when you’re expecting a dignified show about big women who aren’t ashamed of it, the show whipsaws you into something totally different. One at a time the women confess, most tearfully, that their size has hampered, if not totally derailed their love lives. Some say they have never been on a date, or in a relationship, most say they are passed over for their svelte girlfriends. Even more than while watching The Bachelor, the stench of desperation wafts right through the screen. These women are utterly convinced that a reality show is their last, best hope for finding a relationship. Obviously it’s not that serious. Big folks get married all the time, and the slender women on The Bachelor can be just as despondent. But here, being overweight is shown as the ultimate hurdle to romance.

Still, depending on your perspective on the matter, More to Love represents progress. Unlike The Biggest Loser, Dance Your Ass Off and Ruby, More to Love is a show about overweight people that doesn’t relentlessly focus on their efforts to lose the weight. Soon it will be joined by One Big Happy Family, a series just picked up by TLC, which will focus on the lives of a Charlotte, N.C., family, all four members of which weigh more than 300 pounds. Weight loss will be a topic discussed on the show, naturally, but executive producer Mike Duffy says it’s really just a generous slice of life, comparing it to TLC’s little people reality show Little People, Big World. “Little People, Big World is about little people living in a big world,” Duffy told The Hollywood Reporter. “This is about big people living in a little world.”

On the one hand, it’s nice to see television shows that don’t use fat people as the butt of jokes, or offer to put them on television so long as they’re efforting to “normalize” themselves through extreme diet and exercise. But at the same time, television is becoming representative of the larger, totally confusing debate about body weight, which if I’m not mistaken goes a little something like this: Being overweight is unhealthy, so if you’re overweight you need to slim down. Unless you’re happy being overweight and you love yourself, because self-acceptance is much more important than a number on a scale. Still, you should try to figure out the reasons why you eat the way you do, because it probably stems from some emotional issue that needs to be solved. Or maybe you just really like Black Forest cake. But even if it’s the latter case, you should still probably eat less of it, because being overweight is unhealthy. And so on and so forth. Depending on which of these shows you watch, obesity is either the public-health issue of our lifetime, or a totally valid lifestyle choice.

More than that, these new shows expose the underlying judgment that makes it so difficult for us to talk both realistically and compassionately about obesity. On WE’s I Want to Save Your Life, a “diet detective” by the name of Charles Stuart Platkin follows obese people around, watching what they eat and trying to get to the bottom of it, all while exceeding the human capacity for smugness. In the first episode, a stay-at-home mom named Jennifer follows Platkin’s advice and the weight starts to drop off. He comes back some weeks later to check on her progress, and she talks about how she’s starting to feel better and have more energy, and looking better is just the “icing on top.” “Do you really mean the icing on top?” Platkin chides. “The fruit on top,” Jennifer replies, dejectedly. [Ugh. I’m going to pitch a show called, I Want You to Mind Your Own Business –kd]

Meanwhile, on More to Love, the contempt for small women comes fast and furious, turning what should be a show that helped smaller Americans feel compassionate toward their overweight counterparts into just another Us vs. Them reality slugfest. “I think curvy women are attractive,” says one contestant. “Who wants to look at a stick?” There’s lots of talk echoing Luke’s sentiments that big women really know how to live it up, unlike their calorie-obsessed counterparts, and how big women are “real.” Does it really have to be an authenticity debate? Size 2 models are not representative of most American women, but that doesn’t make them holograms. There’s also a whole lot of America between size 2 and size 12.  On both sides of the argument for fat reduction vs. fat acceptance, there’s deep judgment, with the factions looking their noses down at each other and thinking, “You poor thing, that’s no way to live.”

There will probably never come a time when obesity is portrayed with the same compassion as, say, lupus, or any other disease that can befall a person through no fault of his own. (Even though the causes of chronic obesity aren’t totally settled.) So maybe it’s unrealistic to dream of overweight characters routinely included in scripted television shows and occasionally seen pulling a bag of Wheat Thins out of the vending machine. But if reality television is going to be the place for depictions of overweight people, we at least need to figure out some middle ground between obsession with weight loss and defiant denial about the need for it. At the very least, the networks should make sure chunky people are producing these shows, because that’s certainly not the impression I get from watching them. As someone best described as “cute in the face, thick in the waist,” I would feel more comfortable knowing my Fat People TV is being made for couch potatoes, by couch potatoes.