Ok, I must confess an enduring love of bad tv. Particularly and embarrassingly, reality tv. I’ve kept up with the Kardashians, said yes to many dresses and no to my fair shar of 90 day fiancées. I know it is spectacularly stupid, pathetic content, but that is part of the draw I guess.
I find it especially magnetic when I am trying to work through other stuff in my head. The opportunity to space out to other people’s misery is oddly helpful to processing of my own internal world.
So I had a lot on my mind and that’s how I found myself glued to the couch through 2 seasons of 1000 pound sisters. For those unfamiliar with this tv gem, it is about 2 sisters who are obese with a combined total weight of, you guessed it, 1000 pounds. Over the course of the show, one sister manages to drop some weight and get bariatric surgery while the other one…doesn’t. There is much mutual enabling.
A couple of relationship things stood out to me as interesting in this show. One is how both sisters tend to focus on how the other is doing instead of on themselves. They say they are worried about the other sister and how badly they are fucking up, but never turn that lens inward, toward their own situation. An appalling lack of insight and personal responsibility but cloaked in a veneer of concern for their sister. Weird. The other notable thing was the apparent lack of any significant focus on the psychological aspects of the eating disorder. This is clearly an eating disorder; you don’t get to be that large for any other reason than you are eating way too much. And working pretty hard to do so. But nobody ever seems to dig in there – to try to figure out why they are eating such astoundingly huge amounts of food. Seems pretty clear to me there is some hurt and pain driving that, so why wasn’t here an effort to give them some psychological support to address those aspects? Instead, the focus was on continued shaming for not losing the weight. But if these women are eating to manage pain and the underlying cause of the pain is never addressed and they are never taught better coping skills, how are they expected to succeed? Bariatric surgery (if they can get it) will just be a big ol’ temporary band-aid. Like much of American style healthcare. Sadly. I am not naïve, I understand that these shows are often edited to provide more titillation and may not reflect actual reality. But then what does that say about us as a viewing audience (or at least the producers’ perception of us) that we would prefer to watch people struggle and fail rather than see someone take charge of their mental health, do the hard work and succeed? Guess that doesn’t make for good tv.
