‘Losing It with Jillian’: Pass the tissues

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Fresh off ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Jillian Michaels now has her own show, traveling the country and helping families whose lives have gone horribly off track. If you thought the title of the new NBC show -- ‘Losing It’ -- referred to losing weight, or leaving behind personal problems in a quest for a new and more fulfilling life, you’d be wrong.

Surely ‘losing it’ refers to all the bawling going on both on screen and at home. (Or was it just me?)

What did you think of it? Will it be a hit? Or a miss? If you like ‘The Biggest Loser,’ you will want to follow Michaels along, although you’ll probably wish it were two hours instead of a rushed single hour. Either way, its impossible to deny the seismic shift that took place within the Mastropietro family after Michaels came knocking on their door.

Within minutes of her arrival she had the obese parents in the gym alongside their adult children doing jumping jacks. It wasn’t long before mom and dad were resisting the workout, insisting that they could do no more. (Do these people watch ‘The Biggest Loser?’ Don’t they know that is a surefire way to ticking Michaels off?) While ‘Biggest Loser’ fans are accustomed to seeing players on that show flee the gym when Michaels has pushed them to their breaking point, this time it was Michaels’ turn to storm out, snarling that ‘this is a waste of my time.’

It was a ploy, of course, to force the family to make a decision about whether they wanted a life change bad enough to go chasing after her. They did. It turns out that this is a loving, close-knit family with a tragic secret: Mother and father suffered the loss of a son who lived only a month before dying, and the couple dealt with it by never speaking of it, never even placing a headstone on the infant’s grave. But the unresolved grief was destroying them from the inside out, and driving them to food for comfort.

After a few days with Michaels, mom finds the strength to bring the issue out in the open. She begins a family meeting by opening an aged and yellowed photo album and beginning: ‘Jillian, I want you to meet someone. My son.’ (If you weren’t crying by then, you might want to call 911. You might be dead.) If you wonder whether all this yackety yak stuff works, consider the father’s voice. As soon as he decided he would confront all his issues, its timbre became loud and clear and powerful.You could see the family dynamic shift, see the transformation taking place as the family righted itself with this one act, this decision to bring it all out into the open.

There was the happiest of endings, even if there weren’t ‘Biggest Loser’-style numbers on the scale. Mom lost more than 30 pounds. Dad lost more than 40 pounds. And they proudly walked their daughter down the aisle to her wedding (which was paid for by the show, along with the couple’s vacation.)

--Rene Lynch
On Twitter @renelynch