Finally caught up with all of season 9 of My 600 Lb. Life. As much as I love the show, as well as other TLC stalwarts like 90 Day Fiancé, the fact that all their episodes are like 90+ minutes apiece, makes it really hard to commit to the time investment that every single episode takes to watch. As truly great as the shows are, there are often times more important things I could be doing in 90 minutes than watching garbage, albeit it’s garbage that I love.
As I touched on in a prior post, we the TLC viewers were treading into uncharted territory as far as My 600 Lb. Life was concerned, as season 9 was batting a cool .000 as far as people getting onto the surgery table and getting bariatric surgery in order to lose weight. Sure, coronavirus had a tremendous amount to do with that, seeing as how there were 3-4 subjects that qualified for weight-loss surgery, but were unable to actually get it within the episode due to coronavirus. All the same, I count those as failures too, because after 13 episodes, the season ended with not a single person getting weight loss surgery, with the vast majority of them outright failing, because they’re just trainwrecks to begin with.
Going into episode 13, I thought TLC would be saving the best for last, and much like an actual baseball no-hitter, it had to get busted up in the final inning. Certainly, Chrystal would be the person to get her shit together, lose the requisite weight in order to qualify for weight-loss surgery, get on the table, and I could laugh about how the show plans their Dr. Now voiceovers to poorly link to another prerecorded segment where he talks about the benefits of bariatric surgery.
Welp, surgery didn’t happen, in spite of Chrystal’s eventual success at losing the prerequisite weight in order to qualify. But I can’t say that TLC didn’t save the best for last, because in this final episode of the season, not only did we witness a moment where a subject stepped onto an elevator, and made it lurch downward from the weight, causing her to lose her shit in the hallway of whatever econo-motel she and her posse were staying at.
We also had a short but no-less scathing moment of where Dr. Now clinically told the person that she smelled. I’ve watched just about every episode of this show and it’s no secret that these large individuals have hygiene issues a lot of the times, but at no point has Dr. Now ever straight up told a person that they smelled before. Obviously, he didn’t use those exact words, but he also didn’t mince the ones he did when he insinuated that their girth clearly had something to do with the fact that he was smelling something rather unpleasant.
Either way, season 9 is in the books. Blame coronavirus, or blame the format of the show in that they clearly have the spin-off My 600 Lb. Life: Where Are They Now? to hold back pertinent points like successful surgery, but as far as My 600 Lb. Prime goes, we just had an entire season where every single trainwreck in the season, failed.
A real-life, televised no-hitter thrown by TLC, congratulations.
