No Help At All

What’s wrong with TV networks getting into the business of helping the sick and impoverished? More than you'd think.

by John Cook

At some point during the last television season—maybe right around the time Oprah made front-page news by giving away to her audience some of the cars that Pontiac couldn’t sell—the geniuses who make television decided that a new era of reality TV is upon us. Viewers have had enough sniping and backstabbing and bull penis–eating, and the skyrocketing ratings that ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition enjoyed last season pointed the way to a kinder, gentler sort of reality TV universe, one in which Ty Pennington stars as a sort of Mother Teresa with bed head and a circular saw. The War on Poverty, it seems, was being waged one family at a time in prime time.

Why stop there? Instead of using television to humiliate people and revel in their depravity, the thinking goes, we will use it to uplift, to solve problems, to heal. So while NBC has temporarily dropped Fear Factor from the schedule, it is readying the Amy Grant–hosted Three Wishes for the fall, wherein the Christian-pop has-been rolls into small towns in search of, well, charity cases to whom she can play fairy godmother. And earlier this month ABC premiered The Scholar, an unscripted series featuring high school students competing for a college scholarship. Though The Scholar has taken a beating in the ratings, ABC did manage to lure the sponsorship of Wal-Mart, a company loathe to associate itself too intimately with Godless Hollywood.

And really, who, if not Wal-Mart, is running network TV? “We know what we have to do,” embattled NBC chief Jeff Zucker meekly told an audience of rightfully wary advertisers at the network’s upfront presentation last month. Viewers may indeed have tired of the Temptation Island school of televised human degradation, but the real reason for the coming glut of Charity Television is that advertisers never really wanted that mean-spirited crap in the first place. With which story line would you rather associate your paper towels: the fake cowboy trying to convince a bunch of Eurotrash future porn stars that he’s a millionaire, or that nice black lady who got a brand new house?

I guess we should probably agree that shmaltz in reality TV is better than rank ugliness. Who would object to giving someone a new home, a college education, or life-saving medical treatment?

Anybody who thinks that matters of life and death ought to remain outside the clutches of reality TV producers, that’s who. Take The Miracle Workers, a midseason show ABC has picked up for next season that will feature an “elite team of doctors” who descend on hopeless sick people to save their lives. “For individuals who otherwise would never have access to elite medical specialists or the ability to afford costly procedures,” reads ABC’s promotional copy, “The Miracle Workers will make possible what was previously thought impossible.” Over on NBC, the pilot episode of Three Wishes features a little girl who was horribly disfigured in a car accident. (Her father was driving, and her mother, a 911 operator, took the call reporting the collision.) Grant summons the best medical care network money can buy to help reconstruct the girl’s crushed skull.

Why should this turn one’s stomach? Maybe because it’s about gawking at the freakish misery of others. It’s televising that misery for the purposes of selling advertising inventory and then, after peddling the sideshow, getting to feel all warm and fuzzy about it when it’s over. To programmers, dragging injured and infirm people onto a glorified game show and dressing them up with bandages over swelling inspirational music is what passes for a noble gesture. By the way, do you think that pharmaceutical companies might be looking for a medicine-friendly vehicle to advertise on?

“I’m fascinated and horrified,” says Lester D. Friedman, a professor of bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “The reason we go ‘ick’ is we think of health care as a right, and people should not have to make spectacles of themselves to get it. It’s turning medicine into Let’s Make a Deal. And it fits right into the notion that you don’t need national health care, you need faith-based initiatives. If the government doesn’t take care of you, sympathetic individuals”—like Amy Grant—“will come along and fix you up.”

Of course, like all TV programming trends, the Charity TV phenomenon will run its course, viewers will tire of the relentless goodwill and hopeful bromides in prime time, and the networks will get back to finding innovative ways to skewer half-wit suckers. But until then be prepared to cry and suddenly find yourself wanting to buy a lot of Prilosec.

Photo: PMC

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