The 'Daddy' of TV Tastelessness
In real life, people generally don't crawl into coffins with tarantulas. They tend not to get extensive surgery to reconstruct the way they look, and they rarely get to compete for huge amounts of money by marrying a stranger or getting yelled at by Donald Trump.
Most so-called reality shows don't depict reality, of course. Rather, they create fantasies (whether beautiful or grotesque) designed to appeal to dreamers, cynics and voyeurs. And, because those traits run though most people's personalities, millions tune in to watch all sorts of mortifying, salacious and occasionally heartwarming programs.
The formula doesn't always work, however, especially when it deeply offends big segments of the potential audience. A case in point was the Fox special "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay," in which two men competed for $50,000 by pretending they weren't straight; the network canceled the show before it aired earlier this year because of an outcry from gay activists, who described it as "an exercise in systemic humiliation."
The same -- along with words like "outrageous" and "revolting" -- could be said about the latest Fox offering, "Who's Your Daddy?" In this perverse program, a woman who was adopted as an infant wins $100,000 if she can determine which of eight men is her biological father. But if she guesses wrong, the impostor who fools her gets the cash.
Though the show isn't scheduled to run until early January, it already has generated a furor in the adoption community -- which is populated by tens of millions of people whom the show's producers presumably see as potential viewers. Few of them will be watching, though, except perhaps to figure out which sponsors to boycott. Here's why:
For generations, adoption in this country was characterized by denial, degradation and deceit. Many adoptive parents were counseled to pretend they'd given birth to their children. It was considered "good practice" to advise biological mothers (and fathers, when they were involved) to forget about the children they had created and "move on." Adopted people were treated differently: They were routinely denied their medical histories in order to maintain secrecy, for instance, and they were told that the most human of instincts -- wanting to know who you are and where you came from -- did not apply to them.
