The Horrors of Central Casting
We've already written about the travesty that is reality television's latest offering: Miracle Workers. That posting is made even more poignant by a recent report from the Associated Press that the woman featured on next week's show has died as a result of complications following the televised, last-ditch use of an experimental artificial heart pump.
The horrors of reality TV, however, don't stop there. Survivor's annoying,
The Apprentice is bad, and Miracle Workers is disturbing, but what is
completely offensive is the revelation that another reality program, Extreme
Makeover: Home Edition, which builds homes for needy families, seems to be
selecting which families to help not based on need but on what The Smoking
Gun calls a creepy wish list of woe"
It turns out
that producers of the program, which features former-Trading Spaces star and
Sears-shill Ty Pennington, are specifically looking for families who have
lost a child in a drunk-driving accident, or who have members suffering from
very specific diseases - muscular dystrophy, Lou Gehrig Disease, and
progeria. It reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Peter cons a
Make-a-Wish-esque foundation in order to get his favorite television show
renewed. The fictious foundation featured on Family Guy chose which dying
children to help based on their Q factor, but once again the writers of my
favorite animated are not so far off the mark.
-Sean Philpott
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Some readers may be old enough to remember a daytime hit program called "Queen for a Day" where the audience got to choose which of the contestants had the saddest story (measured by a clapping meter). The one with the biggest audience response won something like a washing machine to much crying and audience delight. Extreme Makeover a) is entertainment and b) really pays off for one family per week. The selection process is their own business. At the end of the day, they deliver so why not to a profiled family?
- by Sheila on Mar 31, 2006 at 10:31 AM | link
And long before Family Guy there was radio's (and then TV's) "Queen for a Day," in which women told sad family stories -- often featuring disease and disability -- and an audience applause meter selected the most sympathetic as QFAD, to receive (name-branded) appliances and dinette sets.
"It was exactly what the general public wanted, "the producer said later. "We got what we were after. Five thousand Queens got what they were after. And the TV audience cried their eyes out, morbidly delighted to find there were people worse off than they were, and so they got what they were after."
- by Monte Davis on Mar 31, 2006 at 11:13 AM | link
Huh - thanks for this information. I've been studying desire and reality television for a little over a year now (using Lacan, go me), and this will be interesting fodder to fold into that.
- by Kelly on Mar 31, 2006 at 12:33 PM | link
Wow! How low will Hollywood go? I'm glad we live in a country that allows freedom of choice! My husband and I have chosen to avoid 'reality' shows. We've watched a couple that others had raved about only to look at each other and say "Why?" Thanks for freedom and multi-channels and when that fails...good old books!! Sadness, ill health, poverty, violence and lack of education exist outside our doors , as well as in our televisions. Wouldn't it better to alleviate them ,as able, in your own locality, then to stare at them on a tv and go on your merry way? If everyone did that, instead of watching it evolve on tv, would we need these shows? Don't get me wrong, I am all for giving people a chance to improve or get better but why not the many, not just the few? Changes in the health care system, job opportunities and better access to learning...millions could be poured into these programs rather then into reality shows that expand the fact of inequities and increase the frustration for those who see no way out!
- by B. Bartley on Apr 8, 2006 at 12:23 PM | link