MANILA, Philippines?As the reality TV trend peaks and threatens to run out of viewer appeal, producers have been stretching the popular program format?s limits in search of edgier material to explore?and exploit.
The latest shockeroo is a new show that ?nobly? and ?charitably? seeks to grant the last wishes of some terminally-ill patients!
The people behind the show swear that they simply want to make the patients? final days happy?but how come even some members of the US TV industry are crying foul?
The naysayers fear that the terminally-ill ?wishers? will lose their privacy and that their pain?and yes, even their joy at finally getting to fulfill their dreams?will be mined for all of their melodrama, tearjerker and shock value.
The show?s producers counter that everything in the production is done on a voluntary basis, so critics? fears of exploitation are grossly exaggerated. And yet, the TV medium?s record for truly altruistic programming hasn?t been all that inspiring, making it difficult for the program?s debunkers to calm down.
More recently, Oprah Winfrey?s ?The Big Give? competition had a select group of charitable people vying with each other to raise the biggest amounts for a number of impoverished individuals and worthy causes. On the whole, Oprah?s reality gambit was inspiring.
What did rankle, though, was the discovery that stress and the heat of competition occasionally made these charitable people resort to less than noble ways to call attention to themselves and emerge as winners.
Our third ?extreme? reality show is ?The Next Best Thing,? a competition for celebrity impersonators on the Velvet channel. The unusual tilt invites both professional and amateur impersonators of famous actors, comedians and singers to compete for prizes.
Watching the show, we felt both excited and befuddled as a seemingly endless stream of contestants did their best (and worst) to look, talk, move and sing like celebrities?among them, Britney Spears, Tom Jones, Roseanne Barr, Bruce Willis, Simon Cowell, Rod Stewart, Donald Trump, Groucho Marx, George Burns and Barbra Streisand.
?Roseanne Barr? and ?Groucho Marx? were dead ringers, so they got high marks from the show?s jurors. But ?Rod Stewart? looked more like Barry Manilow, ?Simon Cowell? wasn?t sarcastic at all, and ?Barbra Streisand? looked more like Barbra?s beefy Scandinavian masseuse.
Among the ?singers,? ?Tom Jones? sounded most like the original. ?Britney Spears? also did well?but it turned out that ?she? was a he! That sure threw the jurors for a loop.
Interestingly, the jurors? best bet was a Rodney Dangerfield impersonator?who turned out to be an electrician! We trust that the point is not lost on other amateur talents who want to give impersonation a go.
?Quarantine?
In the terrifying suspense-thriller, ?Quarantine,? Jennifer Carpenter plays a reporter assigned to cover a night shift with two firemen at a Los Angeles fire station. A 911 distress call takes the reporter and her cameraman to a small apartment building, where they find an old woman covered in blood. When a cop approaches to help her, she suddenly attacks him?with her teeth.
When the reporter tries to leave, she learns that the Center for Disease Control has quarantined the building. More violent attacks take place, and when the quarantine is finally lifted, the only evidence of what really took place is in the cameraman?s videotape.
