Former Olympian Rulon Gardner is a featured competitor on this season's 'Biggest Loser: Couples,' and talks in-depth about how he went from Olympic fit (r.) to unhealthy flab.
"The Biggest Loser" won't ever lose its basic appeal, a combination of slightly uncomfortable voyeurism and commendable positive spirit.
That said, it's starting to fray a little around the edges as the new couples season begins Tuesday night.
With Jillian's quasi-terrorism less a novelty than a standard part of the production, the show is counting a little more on competition gimmicks, melodramatic contestant stories and even a little hint of star power.
One contestant this season is Rulon Gardner, who startled and delighted the country a few years back by winning an unexpected Olympic gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling.
He weighed about 285 then. He has since added a couple of hundred more. So he and a pal have signed up, and he turns out to be an entertaining contestant. He also gets a lot of airtime to talk about how he got from the Olympics to here.
In fact, everyone gets a lot of airtime in this two-hour opener. A pair of plus-size police officers, 54-year-old twins, start off as good-natured, self-aware contestants and gradually become soap-opera characters.
One has a son who died of a heroin overdose. The other has a son who disowned him because he seemingly refused to deal with his weight issues.
The stories are touching enough. They just move the whole "Biggest Loser" show a little further from prime time and closer to traditional daytime TV fare.
Tuesday night's featured gimmick, however, is a trainer overhaul. Call it the "Biggest Loser" version of the "American Idol" judge shuffle.
Bob and Jillian are still with us, and increasingly are treated less as trainers than as rock stars.
But the show has added a second pair of trainers, first shown only in mysterious silhouette and called "The Unknowns."
The deal is that contestants get to choose with whom they will train.
If they take "The Unknowns," they get four weeks of guaranteed immunity from elimination.
If they take the rock stars, they don't.
As gimmicks go, this is, pardon the term, thin.
Once we're past these preliminaries, of course, the show's success will depend on how well viewers bond with contestants.
Besides Gardner, it seems to be a solid group, although laden with stories we've heard before. The mother who is concerned about her daughter, who is concerned about her mother. The dad who comes from a culture of hearty eaters who all died before they reached 50, and now has decided he wants to live to see his grandchildren.
There's an opera singer who is mildly haunted by having had a fat joke written into one of her roles.
"The Biggest Loser" still has a ways to roll. But it may be on the downhill side of the ride
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