Thin is passé, Hollywood now cashes in on fat people

Forget about all those scary-skinny stars —  fat is making a comeback in Hollywood. Like ABC’s The Bachelor, which spawned a spate of reality dating shows, NBC’s The Biggest Loser has hatched a ton of weight-loss look-alikes.

There’s Celebrity Fit Club on VH1, Too Fat for Fifteen: Fighting Back on Style, Obese and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on ABC and Thintervention on Bravo. All feature contestants sweating, whining, quitting and reflecting.

And in a nod to The Honeymooners, Roseanne and more recently The King of Queens, the new TV season brings us Mike & Molly, a Chuck Lorre sitcom on CBS that features plus-size stars Melissa McCarthy and Billy Gardell as regular people who meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.

“Nobody cannibalises better than Hollywood,” said JD Roth, co-creator of Biggest Loser who also produces Obese and is prepping What’s Eating You for E! “As soon as something is working, there has to be 40 of them immediately. More is better.”
Thintervention, a recent entry into the weight-loss sweepstakes, garnered a respectable 1.2 million viewers in its premiere on Monday.

The show stars Jackie Warner, the high-powered fitness trainer from another Bravo show, Workout. Like Biggest Loser, Thintervention follows real folks who work out with Warner and attempt to lose 25-100 pounds.

“I think all these weight-loss shows are great,” Warner said. “I love (Oxygen’s) Dance Your Ass Off. Those people have such joy in what they’re doing. I think America has to have the information. I can’t believe how confused America is about weight loss.”

Dave Ehlers, managing director of branded-entertainment outfit ZenithOptimedia, said all the weight-loss shows provide “excellent vehicles” for advertisers targeting individuals who seek a healthier lifestyle.

Roth said Biggest Loser proved a hard sell at first. “I had people say that fat people aren’t attractive and that nobody wants to see fat people on television,” he said.

“I said, ‘Well, do you know anyone who is fat?’ ‘Oh yeah,’ they said, ‘my mother is, my sister and brother is.’ So, I told them that if everyone in this room knows someone who’s in that situation, isn’t that your audience?”

Roth knew what he was talking about. The national centre for disease control reports that 17% of kids and 34% of adults in the US are overweight.

Despite the glut of similar fare, the popularity of Biggest Loser hasn’t waned, and the show holds up when facing such ratings juggernauts as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.
The eighth cycle premiered with 10.4 million viewers, its best performance to date.

Too Fat for Fifteen, which focuses on overweight teens, has attracted 2,15,000 viewers, 50% more than Style’s primetime average. The show stems from a documentary the cable network ran last year about Georgia Davis, dubbed Britain’s fattest teenager, and her attempt to shed pounds at Wellspring Academy in North Carolina.