Necessary? Or Just Insulting?

While watching The Biggest Loser last night, I finally took a stand against something that has been bugging me for years about reality television: the way producers blatantly insult our intelligence.

During the parting interview with Aubrey, the contestant sent home last night, I realized (like oh so many times before) that it was taken from the same interview in which Aubrey explained her pre-weigh-in anxieties as though she hadn't weighed in yet at all. One could brush it off as the producers' necessity to save time and prevent the hassle of multiple interviews, but why insult the intelligence of the viewer by pretending it hasn't happened?

This revisionist editing might not be so irritating if it weren't for the fact that five minutes in the show later we saw Aubrey returning home to a house full of people who greeted her as though they hadn't seen her in months when, in fact, she was home just the week before. In interviews with her family, her husband and sister commented on the "remarkable" change they had saw in Aubrey since the last time they had seen her. (You can watch the entire episode or just the elimination on nbc.com.)

But we, the keen-minded viewers, know the truth. Aubrey had only lost four pounds since they saw her last: the same four pounds that let her fall below the yellow line and be eliminated.
Perhaps these editing strategies wouldn't be so irritating if it weren't for the fact that most producers do the same thing (i.e. Hosea's "Bacon is a vegetable" shirt in EVERY interview during Top Chef: New York).

They may be tiny discrepancies, but shouldn't "reality" television be held to a higher standard?