Wednesday, February 23, 2011
By Robert Lloyd
Los Angeles Times
“Shedding for the Wedding,” which premieres tonight at 9 on The CW, combines the popular weight-loss competition reality genre with the popular planning-for-the-nuptials reality genre — a chocolate-meets-peanut-butter moment that seems both brilliantly inevitable and somewhat recycled.
You know the drill, or should by now. There is almost nothing here that could not be anticipated from the premise. You might as easily, even more profitably, imagine the show as to watch it.
Nine seriously overweight couples compete for a dream wedding, picking up related odds and ends along the way — a gown, a cake, flowers. For narrative color, the couples — bunked together in the customary big house — are identified according to shared interests and the related theme they wish their wedding to take: “Team Eco-Lovers” would like some moss in their nuptials; “Team Gamers” met online playing “Final Fantasy XI” and grew fat playing it together; “Team Greek Week,” who met at a frat party, want a beer-pong table at their reception, “but we want it monogrammed, ’cause that keeps it a little classy.”
The overqualified host is Sara Rue, from “Popular” and “Less Than Perfect” and also a former Jenny Craig spokeswoman; there were 50 pounds more of her once. Rue is too good for this job and, possibly as a result of that, not particularly good at it. Not quite flanking her are a couple of drill sergeants, a nutritionist and a wedding planner.
Even as these things go, “Shedding for the Wedding” is a plate-load of empty calories, a lot of huffing and puffing we’re meant to take as compelling. What should be moments of suspense or drama are thrown away and rushed over, while the players’ commentary consists mostly of variations on “We’re going to win,” “That was hard,” “I was sure this was going to happen, but then the opposite thing occurred” or “I just don’t understand that person.”