What you missed on TLC's 'The Man With the 132-Lb. Scrotum'

The folks at TLC are doing the Lord's work because, on Monday night, the network aired an hour-long docu-special about aman with a 132-Lb. scrotum. It was creatively titled, The Man with the 132-Lb. Scrotum. The special told the story of Wesley Warren Jr., a man who injured one of his testicles and developed a rare condition that mainly just causes his scrotum to grow.

The A.V. Club's Sonia Saraiya watched The Man with the 132-Lb. Scrotum so that you wouldn't have to.

This is not a brand of television that we "do" anymore, in a theoretical sense. This type of circus finger-pointing is one usually left to tabloids or dark corners of 4chan. So much so that there is not much left to say about the one-hour special, beyond the facts: Once upon a time in a country with terrible healthcare coverage and little other institutional supports for their most desperate, a man developed a rare and disgusting condition and spent four years trying to prevent it from killing him. In his direst straits he alighted upon a strategy that would bring him funding for a potentially life-threatening surgery that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—media exposure.

It's a sick, sad world. Fortunately, Warren doesn't seem too down about it. He's not a happy man, but he's remarkably upbeat, both before and after his eventual surgery. What primarily distinguishes Scrotum, aside from the subject matter, is that Warren is darkly humorous about his own condition, able to expose its indignities and to also laugh at it, at least a little. He dresses it in a hoodie, because that's the easiest way to cover his legs and get around the city. He wheels around the lump in a little cart, heavily limping behind it. There is no discernible cause to Warren's condition, which is nothing more than an abnormally large and constantly growing scrotum, one that began to grow one night after Warren accidentally injured one of his testicles. It's extremely rare and eventually fatal. Warren's main goal is to get the scrotum removed without compromising his genitalia or dying the process of a long and painful surgery.

You can check out the full review over at The A.V. Club.