TV Talk: Magee doc talks filming ‘1000-lb Sisters’

For Dr. Peter Rubin, professor and chair of plastic surgery at UPMC, being filmed isn’t that unusual. He’s had cameras trained on him during surgery for a documentary, for medical teaching films and he’s been a guest on “Dr. Oz.”

But appearing in a reality docu-series was new.

Rubin appeared in this week’s seventh season finale of TLC’s “1000-lb Sisters,” which featured one of the docu-series’ leads, Tammy, needing surgery to address her excess skin after losing 500 pounds (she once weighed 730 lbs).

The procedure took place in Pittsburgh in January following an initial consultation locally in May 2024. (This week’s surgery episode is now streaming on Max and discovery+ and will reair at 1 p.m. Saturday, June 14, and 9 a.m. Sunday, June 15.)

Rubin, who said he’d heard of the show but isn’t much of a TV viewer due to his busy work schedule, said the “1000-lb Sister” film crew was highly professional.

“They knew how to stay out of the way of an active OR,” he said. “They were not obtrusive at all. They were really a pleasure to work with.”

The biggest difference with filming for reality TV and an academic film, he said, is with an academic film there’s more attention on technical detail. For reality TV, producers were more interested in the atmosphere of the OR and what would be of interest to a lay audience.

Two surgical teams operating simultaneously conducted Tammy’s surgery over eight hours, with both UPMC Magee-Womens and the UPMC Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Center featured on the series. Ultimately the medical team removed 10½ pounds of skin from Tammy’s body.

Rubin said plastic surgery care for patients who have lost weight successfully has been the focus of his career for two decades. He came to Pittsburgh in 2002 and founded the Life After Weight Loss program.

Perhaps as important as the surgery is preparing patients for the surgery, which was part of Tammy’s consultation.

“Tammy’s (weight loss) was on the more dramatic scale. She’d lost about 500 pounds, which is impressive by any standard and takes a tremendous amount of courage,” Rubin said.

But having that kind of weight tends to result in residual medical problems that have to be evaluated and optimized before surgery. For Tammy, that included improving some nutritional deficiencies and she had to quit vaping using nicotine.

“Nicotine use significantly increases the risk of wound healing complications after plastic surgery,” Rubin said.

Unlike with some plastic surgery incisions that can be measured in inches, plastic surgery after weight loss often results in large incisions measured in feet.

Rubin said it wasn’t possible to remove all the skin in one surgery, so the team made a plan for surgical stages, prioritizing what to address for this first surgery and what might be done in a future surgery should Tammy elect to return. There could be another “1000-lb Sisters” visit to Pittsburgh in the future.

“It’s not booked right now,” Rubin said. “My goal is to get her safely through the first stage, and we haven’t revisited it yet.”

WQED updates

At Thursday’s WQED board meeting, WQED president Jason Jedlinski discussed the potential for draconian cuts to the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS, NPR and member stations, now that a rescission package passed the U.S. House on Wednesday.

“We are deeply disappointed, but not surprised,” Jedlinski said, reading from a statement he prepared for media inquiries.

He said PBS member stations are going through their catalogs of programming, looking for possible filler with stations prepared to share programming with one another given the threats to maintaining the PBS programming pipeline.

“We think our library is portable,” Jedlinski said. “Those stations that remain open will be sharing more content between each other.”

WQED’s funding from the feds through CPB accounts for 11% ($1.8 million) of its operating budget.

“We’re not going anywhere, we’re not closing,” Jedlinski said, but he pointed to the behind-the-scenes efforts CPB funds through PBS, including the development of closed captioning, on-screen ASL interpretation and paying for music licenses systemwide. “We will survive the 11% hit to our budget, but the system will be broken in many ways by this action.”

Most of WQED’s board meeting focused on local efforts, including news that all of Rick Sebak’s shows are now streaming — available to WQED donors who contribute $5 per month or $60 per year to gain access to streaming portal PBS Passport — under “The Rick Sebak Collection.”

Sebak’s latest short on Bottlerocket Social Hall debuted online last week and will be included in the third linear “Lucky to Live in Pittsburgh” compilation, likely to debut on TV in late August or early September.

Following this week’s premiere of Pittsburgh sports-themed “Steel Links,” Jedlinski said the station is talking with the same Connecticut-based filmmaker about another local project, “a continuation with equally big names like Christina Aguilera, Michael Keaton.”

This week WQED began rolling out the 11-episode fifth season of Joe Wos’ “Cartoon Academy,” streaming at youtube.com/@WQED, with plans to push the series as “a national brand,” Jedlinski said. “This is something that is very portable.” (There’s no air date for when the episodes will be packaged for a linear half-hour special as past seasons have been.)

WQED’s eight-episode online series “Authentic Lives,” about the experiences of Pittsburgh’s LGBTQIA+ community, comes to linear TV at 8 p.m. June 26 with two back-to-back 30-minute compilation episodes.

The second episode of “Destination with Natalie Bencivenga” will likely premiere online the second week of July.

The latest Chris Fennimore-hosted “QED Cooks” pledge show, “Around the World in 80 Recipes,” is tentatively scheduled to debut at 10 a.m. Aug. 9.

WQED is working on a new series that will begin as YouTube shorts and later be compiled and packaged for linear TV. “Showdown,” hosted by Nick Tommarello, is a bracket challenge featuring local retailers. Early episodes will cover local ice cream shops.

Kept/canceled

Paramount+ renewed “SkyMed” for a fourth season.

Anime streaming service Crunchyroll renewed “The Beginning After the End” for a second season to stream next spring.

PBS’s “Masterpiece” renewed its redo of “The Forsyte Saga,” now called “The Forsytes,” for a second season with the first season now bumped to 2026.

Fox renewed “Lego Masters” for a sixth season that will include new audition episodes, but Nick Cannon will replace Will Arnett as the show’s host.

Paramount+ will end “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” with an abbreviated, six-episode fifth season. Season three debuts July 17.

Channel surfing

Florida bankruptcy attorney Chad Van Horn, who grew up in Monroeville and competed on Netflix’s “Squid Game: The Challenge,” has opened a branch of his law office locally. … Box office hit “A Minecraft Movie” streams June 20 on Max. … The CW will add to its sports entertainment entries with a live Savannah Bananas baseball game telecast from Philadelphia (3 p.m. July 27, WPNT).