Of the two trainers featured on The Biggest Loser, Jillian Michaels is generally considered the "mean one." While Bob Harper gets all emotionally invested in his contestants and offers nurturing support, Jillian yells at them. If that doesn't work, she screams. And if that doesn't work, she tells them to get the f*#% out of the gym! Don't you want her to come to your house?
Okay, Jillian promises a less "yell-y" version of herself on Losing It With Jillian, a new NBC series tentatively scheduled to bow this summer, but do you really want to see Jillian be nice? There's a reason that Gordon Ramsay is never nice in the states. We like jackasses.
Each week, Jillian moves in with a different family and motivates them to change their lives for the better through exercise, nutrition and a better attitude. And I'm going to guess that there'll be some yelling involved. Maybe Jillian isn't "going to scream at a 10-year old," as she says, but is she going to not scream at a parent who's enabling that 10-year old? If mom or dad are shoving deep-fried twinkie pies down that kids throat just because she says she wants them, don't they need to be yelled at?
The biggest concern I have is that she's only there for a week. As we see on The Biggest Loser all the time, it takes a lot more than a week to erase the psychological issues that lead to someone eating themselves into a piano box burial. And an entire family of people heading down this path is even more emotional baggage to deal with.
Now, maybe with Jillian there 24/7 for a week she can have a better chance to grasp what the issues are and help these families start to sort them out, but I hope there's some sort of follow-up planned. It's one thing for people to say "I've learned so much, I'm going to change my life." It's quite another for them to actually do it. Plus, with these weight loss shows we tend to want to see the weight loss.
