Five Depressing Realities Behind Popular Reality TV Shows
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Television is utter of reality shows starring real people just like us that are designed to make us feel better about our own shitty lives and inspire us to believe that we can accomplish anything. If some random jackass can lose two hundred pounds on The Fattest Loser or turn his restaurant around thanks to Gordon Ramsay, there may be some hope for us yet. Well, maybe not, because as it turns out, the truth behind most of those shows is more depressing than the Nirvana “reunion.”
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The Thickest Loser puts utterly overweight people through an intense diet and exercise regimen to see who can shed the most pounds by the end of the display’s run. The very first few gigs look like a bunch of circus bears doing leaping jacks, but step by step the contestants lose extra weight like car keys on a roller coaster. For example, very first season winner Ryan Benson lost a total of one hundred thirty pounds, which is harshly the equivalent of two Goonies (excluding Sloth and Chunk). Who wouldn’t be motivated by that?
Why It’s Depressing
We’ll tell you who wouldn’t be motivated — anyone who has met Ryan Benson in real life. Benson’s current weight is around three hundred pounds, which is just thirty pounds less than what he weighed at the embark of The Fattest Loser.
Benson isn’t an anomaly — almost every Thickest Loser winner has gained back a chunk of the weight he or she lost on the showcase. The worst example is Season three winner Eric Chopin. Chopin began the showcase clocking in at four hundred pounds, and won after successfully pulling down 200. Once the demonstrate was over, however, Chopin bounced (ahem) right back up to three hundred seventy pounds like he got stung by Earth’s mightiest bee. It’s like some kind of mummy curse the contestants can’t escape.
The unfortunate truth is that people on The Thickest Loser don’t do anything but train for the entirety of the season — the display’s producers cover all their expenses during filming. It’s not like they’re going to work and then driving over to the gym to film some sit-ups. They aren’t doing anything except training, under constant supervision, for however many weeks production lasts.
“Come on! You can do it! Don’t giv- and we’re done, peace!”
Once the display is over, they go back to their normal 9-to-5 lives, which typically do not include managed diet and exercise. They cannot possibly proceed a weight loss program as intense as the one on the showcase, and in all fairness, if you’d spent the past two months sweating through a purple T-shirt with the word “LOSER” written across it while punishingly in-shape people scream into your face about taking responsibility for your love treats, you’d very likely drive straight home and order all of the pizza in the world, too, and not just because there’s no longer anyone there to keep you from doing it.
“You mean to tell me that flawlessly toned professional trainers don’t yell at you every day? Stop making excuses.”
Wait, it gets better. People who witness the display are more likely to have a negative view of physical activity. A latest explore displayed that the grueling way exercise is portrayed on The Thickest Loser actively discourages viewers from wanting to participate. Basically, overweight people watching the showcase see other overweight people weeping, throwing up, and passing out during their exercise sessions while all of the skinny individual trainers just yell and berate them. The end result may be inspirational, but The Largest Loser seems to go out of its way to make the actual process of weight loss seem like thankless fucking misery.
Kitchen Nightmares is a demonstrate where angry celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay goes to failing restaurants to scream at the owners for two weeks straight until their food stops tasting like farts.
“If I don’t scream, how will you know how bad you suck?”
Ramsay’s mechanism of bellowing profanity like a Nazi born from a Vidal Sassoon explosion magically rescues the restaurant from the brink of financial collapse and restores its profitability. His work finish, he floats away on the breeze like Mary Poppins to find another ailing eatery in need.
Why It’s Depressing
Oddly enough, restaurateurs who are terrible at running a business don’t abruptly become J.D. Rockefeller just because a Scottish man shouts at them and gives them a fresh menu their cooks can’t even read. In actuality, only about a third of the restaurants Ramsay “rescues” actually manage to stay open once he leaves them in a haze of scowls and belittlement, and the number drops as time goes on. For example, in the very first two seasons of the showcase (2007 to 2009), Ramsay rescued twenty one restaurants. Only two are still open.
And one of those might be a de-robe club with a buffet.
For comparison, about forty percent of fresh restaurants are able to stay in business after three years, so kicking off a fresh place from scrape would give you better odds than a Kitchen Nightmares visit.
Now, we do have to be fair here — Ramsay doesn’t visit a restaurant unless it’s teetering on the brink of disaster. So it could be argued that without him and his very expensive intervention (often buying them all fresh equipment and decor, and even lending them staff), zero percent of them would have survived. Still, each scene finishes with inspirational music, owners who have seen the light, and a restaurant that has undergone a accomplish renovation with a brand fresh menu and a dining room utter of customers. There’s no hint that all Ramsay has done is delay the unpreventable.
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition features the world’s most excitable man and his impossibly attractive squad building awesome fresh houses for people who have been shit on by life. The family gets sent on a complimentary vacation while the squad either does extensive repairs and renovations or substitutes the entire goddamn thing. Truly, there is no aspect of this that anyone could be upset about.
Albeit whoever Photoshopped this picture was clearly feeling vengeful about something.
Why It’s Depressing
For starters, you can’t throw downtrodden waste management employees into a five-bedroom mansion when they aren’t even able to make the payments on their leaky two-bedroom sadness bungalow. Sure, the demonstrate’s producers may cover all the construction costs, but the fortunate homeowners are left on their own to figure out how in the name of Warren Buffett’s gilded butt hairs they’re going to cover the utility bills and property taxes that have skyrocketed as a result of their extreme home makeover.
One family, which had a fresh home specifically designed to help their developmentally challenged son, was coerced to put the house on the market after just a little over a year because they simply couldn’t afford what it cost in both time and money to maintain a palatial four-bedroom estate while attempting to raise three children, one of whom has special needs. That’s like Santa Claus bringing a lonely kid an awesome robot friend who, by the way, must be fueled by human blood.
“Whoops, looks like you’re low on fuel. Come on, let’s get down to the homeless shelter.”
Another duo fell behind on the $405,000 loan they had to take out just to keep their utilities connected in the million-dollar mansion built for them by the showcase (which inexplicably included a carousel and a movie theater, because those are things that a youthfull spouse and wifey need to turn their luck around) and were compelled to sell the house and auction off most of its contents.
Arguably worse is the fact that your eligibility for an Extreme Makeover visit is indeed only limited by the number of children’s tears you’re willing to sacrifice. The Leomiti family took in five orphans burdened with the debt of their dead parents, making them irresistible candidates for the display’s producers. However, as soon as Ty Pennington swooped in to turn their shitty house into Xanadu, they instantaneously booted those smelly orphans the hell out.
Oprah is famous for providing out free stuff to her audience (which is a big switch for older readers, who may recall when she was famous for being fat and losing a bunch of weight). She embarked puny, slinging bounty cards and promotional material from her various guests, until she eventually determined that all of that nonsense could smooch her billion-dollar donk and gave away two hundred seventy six brand fresh cars to members of her studio audience.
“EVEN MY MICROPHONE IS GOLD! I HAVE SO MUCH MONAAAAAAAAAAAAY!”
This was followed by photos of hysterical people weeping tears of joy over Oprah’s saintly generosity.
Why It’s Depressing
Unluckily, receiving a luxury item as a prize on a television display doesn’t exempt you from having to pay the accompanying taxes (see Extreme Makeover, above). Which is the precise situation faced by everyone who has ever been given a car by Oprah Winfrey.
You see, for the purposes of her own tax records, Oprah announced all of her giveaway cars “prizes” instead of gifts. This may seem like a trivial distinction, but as far as the IRS is worried, anything that’s designated a bounty is non-taxable, but a prize is basically just like any other income. This is why you never had to pay taxes on that Super Nintendo your grandmother gave you.
“For tax reasons, I can’t give you Donkey Kong Country in the continental U.S.”
But Grandma wasn’t able to deduct the purchase of the Nintendo from her taxes, either, which is why Oprah didn’t want to go that route. So, Oprah listed the value of each car at its utter MSRP of $28,500, and that money counts as income whether you received it in the form of a car or a paycheck. And like any income, the audience owes taxes on it — this meant that each fortunate audience member who received a car from Oprah had to instantly pay as much as $7,000 out of their own pocket for a car they neither asked for nor were expecting.
This isn’t like getting $28,500 cash, where you expect to get less after Uncle Sam takes a bite. This is a car — you can’t just lop off a quarter of it and keep the rest. So if the winners didn’t happen to have that kind of cash sitting around, their only options were to either sell the car to pay for the property tax (hooray) or forfeit the car and get nothing (hooray).
“Just because I’m a billionaire and the giveaway generated millions in free publicity?”
She’s got a point — this would be an awfully expensive giveaway if she weren’t able to write off the loss . oh, wait. Oprah never paid a cent for the cars in the very first place. They were all donated by the manufacturer.
Storage Wars documents the adventures of a group of uninsurable heart disease risks who buy storage lockers at auction to (hopefully) sell the contents for a clean profit. These are lockers total of what were once people’s prized possessions that have since been abandoned.
They don’t find almost as much feces as you’d think.
The risk/prize aspect of the program has proven to be a massive draw, resulting in two spinoffs and a handful of copycat shows, because evidently the thrill of watching a bunch of slouching millionaires pay hundreds of dollars for garages utter of porn and old mattresses is simply too compelling to be restrained to a single television series.
Why It’s Depressing
If you’ve ever observed Storage Wars, you may wonder why a person would leave a $6,000 coin collection in a storage unit and then default on the rent. The reaction is indeed sad, no matter how you look at it.
Yes, even if you hold a puppy in front of your face.
You see, originally the demonstrate’s producers intended to delve into the background of each locker featured on Storage Wars, but unsurprisingly, all the information they uncovered was unspoiled, unmitigated misery. The reason these abandoned treasures are abandoned is that the original owners of the units failed to make their rent payments. This is because they could no longer afford them due to unemployment, homelessness (hence putting all their belongings in a storage locker), divorce, or illness, or because they had freaking died and were therefore no longer able to pay.
But don’t worry, because according to former Storage Warrior Dave Hester, the demonstrate is all rigged anyway. Hester claims that all of the valuable items found inwards the lockers are actually planted there by the demonstrate’s producers, which would explain how the bidders could inexplicably find something like a Rembrandt stashed in a 6-by-12 unit alongside a box utter of GamePro magazines. He also insists that all of the auctions are staged, meaning every “bidding war” you witness on the display is actually entirely scripted.
We should point out that he was totally fine with the deception until being fired from the display after three seasons.
Furthermore, the producers evidently give the “weaker” cast members an allowance, more or less, so they can actually afford to make bids (you know, on the display about people who supposedly bid on storage lockers for a living).
Big deal, so it very likely isn’t real. It’s just entertainment, right? Well, according to this article, people in dire financial straits via debt, unemployment, or a perverse combination of both have been downright taken in by the display’s “hidden treasure” aspect and have begun displaying up to storage locker auctions ready to bid every penny they have left in the hopes of scoring a valuable haul. If the display is motionless, those (literally) poor bastards have zero chance of finding anything more than some old gas cans and a mummified rat, which you may notice are items that have very little resale value. They’ve been tragically misled into dumping what little remains of their private assets into a fictionalized enterprise. They’d have been better off trading their money for magic fucking beans.
So in summation, Storage Wars is either staged and dupes desperate people into financial ruin, or it is real and capitalizes on painful misfortune. Either way, you’re watching a bunch of ass holes laugh and joke as they make money off of the tattered remains of people’s lives.
Karl Smallwood recently wrote a book containing dozens of email exchanges with people who hate him, read about it here. He also has Twitter. Mohammed Shariff’s cousin is on a quest to detect the coolest cafes in London.
And stop by LinkSTORM to see what happens when Cody and Brockway sit and compare beards.
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