REALITY TV COMES TO OKLAHOMA

Have you ever watched the show “Wife Swap”? I had heard of the program, but I mistakenly assumed it was something produced by Hustler Video. It turns out it’s a bona fide prime time series in which two women, who appear to be total whack-jobs, trade families for two weeks. During the two week period each family learns valuable life lessons like, “why I will never allow my family to be humiliated on national television again.”

Although I had never seen the show, my wife and I were eagerly awaiting this week’s episode because one of the women is a patient of my wife’s.

This woman and her husband are uber money managers who at 31 years of age own their $750,000.00 home outright, pay their children (4, 7, and 9) meager wages for chores, and then make them pay their own way when they go on a family vacation. How do you feel about someone who is shrewd enough financially to pay off their ¾ of a million dollar home by age 31? Yeah, I hate them too.

In contrast, the woman she traded places with was a spend-thrift who had placed her family at the brink of bankruptcy. She also forced her milquetoast husband to sleep in a separate room; barking orders at him through a megaphone, while she shared her bed with her 12 year old son who’s every whim she indulged. Can you say creepy? I sure can.

It turns out that the episode was almost pulled by producers because it wasn’t dramatic enough (“drama” being defined as Jerry Springerish histrionics.) Apparently, in “reality” these two women are actually reasonable people and the producers had to edit the hell out of the footage to make them appear to be mothers on which Child Protective Services should have intervened years ago.

But wait, the reality TV train doesn’t stop there! Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, is currently taping an episode in a small community just north of Tulsa.  Here is the family story being reported: A small town Baptist Minister with five children looses his young wife in a tragic automobile accident. He later remarries and he and his new wife have five more children (in case you’re wondering, birth control hasn’t made it to Oklahoma yet.) At 47 years of age, the minister drops dead from a heart attack while playing basketball in the church gym, leaving his grieving and penniless wife to raise 10 children by herself.  I’ll be the first to admit that is a heart wrenching story, but the local scuttlebutt is that the producers of the show are playing fast and loose with the facts of the story to up the “sniffle-factor” and that the grieving widow is not exactly the Mother Teresa clone she is being made out to be.

Television producers are not idiots; soulless, manipulative, exploitive, money-grubbing hacks, yes, but idiots, no. They are fully aware that the American public will not watch these shows unless they amp up the drama to “extreme” proportions.

Why is this so? What’s wrong with the American public? Why do these shows multiply like rabbits on Viagra? Do we not have enough drama in our own lives so that we are forced to live vicariously through the manufactured drama of others? Are we all emotional adrenaline junkies?

Yes, we are, but I for one find “drama binging” to be pathetic and I plan to break the vicious cycle by beginning a steady diet of nothing but televised golf.

Ooohh…I just had a thought! If they started placing land mines all over the golf courses, televised golf would be MUCH more dramatic. Excuse me, I’ve got to go call a producer.

SIDE NOTE: If you enter “wife swap” into google, you get many “interesting” hits.