TLC is coming out with a new reality series called Hot & Heavy, and Twitter users are incensed.
The show will focus on "mixed-weight" couples, arbitrarily defined in this instance as men who are in love with plus-size women. The show is set to appear on the network in January and will follow the lives of Adrianna and Ricardo, Joy and Chris, and Kristin and Rusty. The couples are shown to care for each other very much, despite the reaction they get from others.
"For these couples, love knows no size," the network tweeted.
“I absolutely love Kristin’s size—I wouldn’t mind if she was a little bigger,” Rusty says in the trailer of his partner, Kristin. Joy admits her mother told her "it would be difficult to find love if I was heavy," but her partner, Chris, says he loves "every inch of Joy. There are a lot of inches to love."
While there is no problem that these couples have decided to express their love for one another, Twitter users are upset with how the show appears to be exploiting the couples. "I want 'mixed-weight' to die a fiery death. Because overwhelmingly this is applied to fat women in relationships with less fat or thin men," one person tweeted. "Meanwhile pop culture has been giving us fat men with thin wives as a norm for like every comedy sitcom or romcom?!?"
"TLC doesnt need to make an exploitive show about 'mixed weight relationships,' another person tweeted. "Just follow some fat people and you can see first hand what it feels like when you go out to eat and the waitstaff gives you separate checks even though you were holding hands the whole meal."
Other tweeters offered insight into why the premise of the show was so offensive:
