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Do Tragedy and Competition Make For Good TV?

by John J. Fanning

I have decided to give up watching Extreme Makeover - Home Edition on Sunday evenings. Every Sunday, my wife and I will settle down to watch a little television together and the next thing we know we are sobbing in each other's arms.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this television program, the way it works is that people send a video to ABC that details the story behind a person or family who the submitters believe are deserving of getting a new home and other lavish gifts. Obviously, the more sadness and tragedy in a person's life the better their chances of being selected to receive a home remodeling or an entirely new home.

Lately it seems the show's producers have gone out of their way to find people with incredible stories of sadness and tragedy in their lives. And frankly, I can't bear to have my Sunday evenings ruined anymore by listening to and watching all this sadness. Even our dogs have taken to howling at the television screen in sympathy for some of the poor wretches the Extreme Makeover team manages to find and bring into our living room each Sunday.

I just can't take it any longer.

There is another aspect about this show that disturbs me as well as its uncanny ability to depress the most upbeat of viewers. And I readily admit that this could be due purely to cynicism on my part - but I can't help but feel that the stories being produced on videos and submitted to ABC seem to have increased in quality and tend to hint at increasingly greater degrees of professionalism.

Maybe my cynicism is sparked from memory of an earlier show on television called "Queen for a Day". This show aired in the late 1950's in Chicago and was a huge hit for a short while. My mother loved this show and would watch it every day in the afternoon when it came on the air. The scenario of this show was that three contestants would compete against one another in front of a live audience. Each contestant would relate to the audience and viewers at home just how horrible and tragic their life was. At the end, the audience would clap for each contestant and a "clap-o-meter" would measure the sound. The contestant that had the most applause was declared "Queen for a Day". She had a crown placed on her head, a cape draped around her shoulders and was given a washer and dryer and sent on her way.

In those days, a washer and dryer was enough to make up for having your entire family killed or your house blown away in a tornado. Today I guess, the monetary value of such tragedy is, at a minimum, a new house.

Anyway, what seemed to do in the "Queen for a Day" show was the obvious need for each contestant to have a more tragic story than other contestants. Let's face it - contestants aren't stupid. It didn't take them long to figure out that if they wanted that washer or dryer they had better make their tragic story sound a little worse than perhaps it actually was. As a consequence, and in order to keep an audience tuned in day after day, the producers were forced to find contestants for future shows who had greater tragedies in their lives than earlier contestants. The whole thing became some sort of a sick tournament of pitting one wretched survivor against another in an endless downward spiraling of sadness.

Eventually, this show reached bottom when it presented a survivor from the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, to compete on the show. Obviously, that contestant won. But the horror of her story made viewers and even contestants finally start to question what was going on.

Today, to become a contestant on Extreme Makeover, Survivor, or any of the other reality television shows out there, you have to produce a video that the show's producers think is interesting. In the case of Extreme Makeover - Home Edition, that video has to show that you are "deserving". So, if these videos are key to getting selected as a contestant or a winner, than it seems to me that the best way to actually produce a "winning" video is to hire professionals to produce one for you. And, if you're going to go that far, you might as well go for hiring a good screenwriter as well.

Would-be contestants have already gotten caught faking some of these audition tapes. In Pennsylvania, for example, a 46-year-old female school bus driver was arrested after having kids on her bus throw things around and pretend to cause mayhem so she could video tape it and submit it to producers of the hit show, Survivor. Would it really be too farfetched to believe that other contestants are hiring professionals on the sly to produce their audition tapes?

I can see an entire cottage industry existing around producing videos for would-be contestants on reality shows. And I can see writers out there producing sob stories for contestants. Eventually, with all this creative talent out there, we will be able to explore the entire depth of human suffering in our quest to find deserving people to give a house to.

Won't that be something?

I don't know how far and for how long the Extreme Makeover - Home Edition people can go before this show ultimately reaches bottom. I just know I'm tired of the ride now and have no desire to be there at the end. I'm tired of beginning my Sunday nights bummed out and I'm too jaded to believe that some of the stories I hear have not been embellished to some extent.

I know this world can be cruel. I know bad things can and do happen to good people. I just don't think that tragedy and competition makes for good television.

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