The Biggest Loser, Twitter, and Cultural Insights

(Justin) One of Joni's favorite shows in the U.S. was The Biggest Loser, and we watched the first couple seasons together. The show is brand new here in Turkey, it's a 30 minute show that comes on every night on Star TV. In Turkish, it's called A New Life. It's become our favorite show.

The setup of the show, music, drama, etc. are identical to the U.S. version. (One odd difference is they filmed it in the winter and it appears many of the buildings aren't heated, so the contestants are often working out while wearing heavy parkas.)  The show is on Week 3, I think.

As in America, I like to find people's comments on Twitter while I watch a show as it's like watching a show with a bunch of friends (who you don't have to clean up after) and it's great for language learning. Judging from Twitter, the show does not appear to be gaining the popularity here that it has in the U.S., at least among the young people who predominately tweet. There are few tweets and I find the majority are negative-- "Can you believe how weak these people are?" "Is this a cruel joke?" "This show is too American," etc.

You don't see many obese people in Turkey (I think most people in the U.S. know it's predominately an American problem), particularly among the young so I suspect there is an element of shame involved here that may be different than in the U.S.

Tonight the show had a good cultural insight as it highlighted how much Turks love children. Elias often gets doted on and given plenty of free stuff (namely candy) in stores. Tonight the physical challenge was a 100 meter dash with 2 contestants pairing off but also having to run against one random child (grades 1-6). When they brought out the children the contestants about melted, and one of them commented that the kids were so sweet that it was hard to think about competing. One of the women claimed she quit running because she was so struck by the child's charisma ("karizma," a new Turkish word). At the end, the contestants who lost seemed just to be happy to have seen the kids-- and these were just random kids, not their own. It struck us as bizarre.

Jeopardy! is finally making its way to Turkey soon and I look forward to watching it, I think I'll learn quite a bit of knowledge from it but I wonder if Turks will enjoy the question novelty.  I'm not sure if other reality TV shows exist on Turkish broadcast (read: free) television but there definitely aren't as many as in the U.S. I wonder why that is (and also consider this to be an advantage for Turkey :-) )?