The news has emerged that Mel B is now going to host Dance Your Ass Off, replacing season one host Marissa Jaret Winokur. I know it’s not a case of “heavier host gets pushed aside for nameless skinny host” — Mel B certainly brings star power, Spice Girl fans, and honed dancing skills to the job. But I, for one, will miss seeing Marisa as a great curvy role-model herself in all her fa-fa-fa-fabulous sparkly outfits on the show. Winokur’s rep tells People that it was a mutual decision for her to leave the show — partly because of the format’s lack of interaction with the contestants and partly because of “criticism she received from producers regarding her appearance.” Executive producer Dan Cutforth told People that Mel B was a better fit with Oxygen’s core audience.
So what do you think, should a weight loss dance show have a curvier host or can anyone fat or thin do the job just as well?
Maybe I’ve been wrong about Heroes. All along, I thought the show was supposed to be a serialized science-fiction mytho-pop thriller, one of those post-Lost shows that hurtles a diverse cast of eccentric characters through a morally ambiguous world filled with long-running mysteries and soap opera played like epic melodrama. By that criteria, Heroes has become one of the worst shows on TV. The characters have been shorn of all dimensionality and purpose: it’s often unclear why anyone does anything now. The only real mystery of this season is what, exactly, Samuel Sullivan is planning to do, and since none of the good guys know what Big Bad’s evil plan is, all of their actions have an airless quality.
