While Mark Philippoussis was busy making the biggest non-decision of his life on the season finale of NBC’s Age of Love, ABC premiered the latest version of weight loss reality competition, Fat March. August truly is the dumping ground for the summer’s worst films and series, so if you aren’t up to speed on this one, you’re probably not alone. The basic gist is that 12 extremely overweight contestants must walk from Boston to DC to lose weight and win prize money – as a team. It should also be noted that Fat March is based on Too Big To Walk, a British show with a ridiculously more awesome name and similarly shitty premise.

Watching shows like this, I always wonder what obese people (that’s 1/3 of the nation’s population and probably an even higher percentage of its television audience) think of them. As a non-obese American, I find them sad/inspiring/funny whenever the editors want me to feel such a way, but do the likes of The Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club serve as motivation for those who are dangerously overweight or further fuel their anxiety? It’s a moral quandary someone might want to investigate, and they can start by interviewing the poor sap who got kicked off of Fat March.

Seriously. At the end of the first episode, the contestants were informed that they had a decision to make. They could vote someone off - the weakest link, if you will - or they could vote for no one and risk having to make up the miles of any player who subsequently drops out. Considering the prize money is significantly lowered if someone is voted off, and the bonds that they had already forged, you’d think they’d unanimously choose to stick together.

Therein lies the evening’s lesson: when threatened with the slightest possibility of extra physical activity, fat people will choose betrayal - even over money. It’s sad because the Fat March kids had me at the beginning of the hour. They were self-deprecating when others might have been whiny, and their enthusiasm even prompted me to set my alarm for an early morning run. But in the grand tradition of all reality show contestants, they’re just as effed up as their trimmer contemporaries.