Atlantic Blog - How low can you go?
FOX TV has a nifty new show coming up.
The Fox network said Tuesday it will air a special next month, "Who's Your Daddy?", where a daughter given up for adoption as an infant attempts to guess the identity of her birth father for a $100,000 prize.
. . .
The woman who is the focus of the show, not identified by Fox, and her birth father were both involved in simultaneous searches for each other.
Her natural dad will be one of eight men presented to her, all claiming to be her father. She will be given opportunities to observe and interview the men to narrow the field, the network announced.
If she correctly guesses which man is her father, the woman can win as much as $100,000. If she is incorrect, the imposter that she chose will win the money, Fox said.
Either way, the special will end with the father and daughter being reunited.
Of course, there are the killjoys.
"This is really perverse," said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan P. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and policy organization. "It takes a deeply personal and important experience and turns it into a money-grubbing game show. I think it is despicable."
. . .
Joseph Kroll, executive director of the North American Council on Adoptable Children, called the idea "repulsive." He said his own 29-year-old daughter is searching for her birth father.
"If someone were to try doing that to my daughter, what I consider to be abuse, I would not behave appropriately," Kroll said.
Pertman, a former Boston Globe reporter and author of the book "Adoption Nation," predicted the television show would denigrate the experiences of families who have gone through adoption.
Lousy killjoys. A century ago, they would have complained about the travelling carnivals with the mentally retarded guy who bit the head off a rat.
Me, I'm no killjoy. In the spirit of it all, I'm even going to give FOX a proposal for a new reality TV show, gratis. And it would be really cheap. They fly to The Sudan, or maybe the Congo or Zimbabwe, and find a dozen starving kids, with photogenic distended bellies. Bring along a cheap food basket, put the kids through a few contests, and the winner gets the food basket. Maybe they could even film the rest of the kids starving to death. Nah, skip that last bit. Just show the one winning kid licking his lips with joy. That should bring in all the sentimentalist viewers. |
