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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
The exploitative "Who's Your Daddy?" is too stupid to get worked up over. But Americans might want to question the Fox idea of family.
Jan 4, 2005 | On the corkboard above my 4-year-old son's bed, there is a photograph of a young Vietnamese woman in a polka-dotted blouse and blue jeans, sitting in a Ho Chi Minh City garden with a baby in her lap. The baby is my son. The woman is his birth mother. And the picture is there because, on Mother's Day 2004, my son, for the first time in his young life, became curious about the woman who had brought him into the world. We showed him the pictures, we told him her name, we told him as much as we knew about her (not much). He listened and then, very quietly, asked if he could keep one of the pictures in his room. And there it sits, on the wall over his bed.
I wonder now. What if, instead of giving him this picture, I had given him pictures of eight different Vietnamese women? And told him to guess which one was his real mom? And given him an ice cream cone for picking the right one? In short, what if I had made a game out of his simple desire to know his birth parents?
I didn't consider it at the time, but then I am neither Scott Hallock nor Kevin Healey, the brains behind Fox's "Who's Your Daddy?" a reality show that rivals last fall's "Wife Swap" for drooliest title and the recently aborted "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay" for worst pre-release publicity. As soon as adoption activists got wind of the show's premise -- a young woman wins $100,000 if she chooses her biological father from a group of eight men all claiming to be Dad -- they got busy denouncing it. "Repulsive," said Joseph Kroll of the North American Council on Adoptable Children. "It takes a deeply personal and important experience and turns it into a money-grubbing game show," said Adam Pertman of the Evan P. Donaldson Adoption Institute. And in a letter to Fox president Peter Chernin, the president of Families With Children From China denounced the program (sight unseen) for its "circus-like atmosphere" and called it "a new low for the Fox network."
Well, I'm here to say it's just the same old low. We live -- don't we? -- in a cultural age where every human moment, from conception to death, can now be squeezed into a few minutes of electronic epiphany. Marriages are brokered, families rejiggered, bodies mutilated, careers launched. One way or another, we are all -- moms and dads, midgets and millionaires, gays and straights, Trumps and Hiltons -- dragged onto the great national midway. The proper question is not "Why adopted children?" but "What took Fox so long?"
So when I sat down last night to watch the pilot episode of "Who's Your Daddy?" I was curious to see if the pit really was being dug deeper. Which meant that I first had to get beyond the tawdriness of that title. Christ! If Fox execs, without qualm or demurral, could attach a sexual connotation to the search for a lost parent, I had to wonder what else they kept in their bulging pockets. And I didn't feel any less queasy in the opening segment, when T.J., the young heroine, approaches in a black cocktail dress with plunging neckline. She may be going to find Daddy, but with her blond locks and round, moist eyes and surgically enhanced lips, she looks ready to lasso a daddy or two before she's done. (It turns out that T.J. does, in fact, have soft-core porn experience.)
After meeting the paternal octet over cocktails and studying them via surveillance camera, T.J. must, according to the show's rules, narrow them down to four. ("I don't think you're my father"; "I feel like you could be my father.") Knowing that her real dad was a prize-winning disco dancer, T.J. must then take the remaining four onto a dance floor to watch their moves. Two more are eliminated. The final two sit down with T.J. for private confessionals, drop off gifts (a sketch, a stuffed black Lab), and leave T.J. to make what the announcer insists is "the biggest decision of her life."
