it’s half Joe Millionaire! It’s half My Big Fat Obnoxious ______! It’s total crap!
I saw this show last night on NBC and it has got to be THE stupidest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. For those of you not familiar, it’s a reality show within a reality show. The real show is that this girl needs to pretend that she won the lottery, and needs to try to piss off her family as much as possible by dragging them around Rodeo Drive and make them watch her blow $5 Million Dollars, but the catch is that she isn’t allowed to buy anything for anyone but herself. Her family thinks that they are being filmed for a special on the aftermath of winning the lottery, although I don’t see why they can’t see through this, especially considering all the obligutory reality show “describe how you’re feeling while watching this scene” interviews
Anyway, I’m not surprised a bit that there’s no thread on this show, considering that the average doper wouldn’t go near it, but I really felt the need to leave a record of it on this board, just to remind everyone about just how BAD these shows can manage to get.
don’t tell me that anyone is actually ENJOYING this show? I predict that next week’s episode will be the lowest rated show in NBC history … who’d actually enjoy watching a girl pretending to be a snobby bitch just to make her family cry?
Trust me. Trading Spouses is nothing compared to Hoax. A show like Trading Spouses or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? could in theory rise above their sleazy origins - if the contestants had some innate dignity they could impart it to the show and people’s lives might be improved. Even shows like Candid Camera or Punk’d have a theoretical chance of rising above their origins. But the Five Million Dollar Hoax has nothing - its basic premise requires its central character to be sleaze and to voluntarily participate in her own debasement.
The only good thing to say about this show: It’s only 3 episodes long.
However, in this new age of “reality” tv i’ve grown wise to the tricks of the editors and writers and can see through a lot of the crap. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
For this show they would actually have you believe that a daughter could win $5 million and spend it all in front of her family without anyone saying “boo”. Right.
No dad saying “can we talk privately for a second so I can talk some sense into you”? No daughter escaping the producers and cameras for a second to tell even one family member “It’s a hoax, just play along”? I’m not buying it.
I have never seen Trading Spouses, but based on what I’ve heard about it…the difference between that and shows like Who Want to Marry A Millionaire is that everybody involved in those shows signed up to be on a reality show. Nobody except for the central character volunteered to be on Hoax, and it is the family members who had the cameras thrust on them who are being exploited.
What is the lesson on this show? Is it that if your daughter wins the lottery and decides to be a bitch about it and throw all of your money away, you’re expected to support that…and be rewarded for it? Is it that if your daughter wins the lottery, and you expect a little bit of the cut, it makes you greedy? Are we supposed to root for the girl giving up on the game, realizing that what she is doing is only destroying her relationship with her family (yeah right, like the producers will let THAT happen?)
Question: Why does the daughter (the faker) do this? Does she get some sort of cash prize if she pulls off the ruse successfully? I’d like to think that there has to be some motivation (craven as it may be) for someone to put their family through this…
I still haven’t seen an episode, but I’ll tell you why I like the premise of it.
I absolutely loath greed and envy within a family. Were I or any of my family to win a large cash, we all know damn well some of it would be spread around. If there was a camera crew there to tape any of us spending every penny solely on ourselves, the ruse would be called in about 3 minutes.
The fact that her family is buying into this shows two things. First, they’re not completly stunned by episode three so they, knowing her better than us, believe she’s capable of such selfishness. Two, they’re showing how greedy they are by expecting to cash in on her good fortune, using I assume passive-agressive tactics.
I can’t believe I’ve missed this show based on how much I was looking forward to it.
I was a huge fan of Joe Millionaire and My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, so I figured that I’d give this show a shot as well.
Basically, the producers are talentless hacks. They pulled the least likeable family EVAR and took the least likeable family member from said family and made her the star of the show.
It’s not entertaining, but it’s interesting to watch her family call her all sorts of names and talk about how awful and what a bitch she is when she’s ultimately attempting to win a large sum of money for her family.
I think they should scrap the whole thing and just give her dad (the nicest, untrashiest member of the family) a cool mil and a one-way plane ticket to Havanna. That poor bastard.
As I understand it, the premise is that this woman volunteered to be part of the scam. The producers told her family she won a sweepstakes and they were going to film a documentary of the winner’s family. The sweepstakes is fake obviously. The real deal is that the woman is supposed to waste all the money buying things for herself and not spend anything on anyone else. If she can successfully convince her entire family that this is true than she will win the real prize (I believe it’s $400,000).
But hey I’ve got a better idea. We’ll take a typical American family with a mother, a father, and three kids. Then we’ll have the parents tell their children that they can’t afford them anymore and they’re putting two of them up for adoption. We’ll have all kinds of wacky contests where the kids try to convince Mom and Dad to pick them and send away their siblings instead. Then in the special two hour finale, we’ll let the parents pick who they love the best and put the other two in a car to go to the orphanage. But at the last minute, we’ll reveal it was all a set-up and the family’s gets a new plasma TV. So everyone’s a winner!
Saturday Night Live (I believe it was) once did a PARODY of Candid Camera, in which they:
(A) Gave people a slice of cheesecake and a fork whose tines had been heated to incandescence in a flame, and didn’t tell the victims that the fork was hot; and
(B) Told a bunch of little kids, one at a time, that their parents were putting them up for adoption.
I have a sinking feeling we’ll soon be seeing life imitate art here…
As ridiculous as it was, everybody who was on Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire knew that at the end one of them would really end up marrying a real live multimillionaire.
Joe Millionaire and Who Wants to Marry are in the same group. On both shows, everybody involved SIGNED UP to be on a reality show. It was a big lie on Joe, but at least the contestants were there by their own decision, and it was easier to laugh at them being fooled and acting like greedy bitches because that was their GOAL by being on the show.
On Hoax, the family was pushed into the show. Nobody except for the main character volunteered to be on television. They think that the cameras are there as part of the celebration. It was a similar thing on My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancee, but at least that show was still good-spirited about things - where the goal was for the family to accept somebody into the family who they thought their daughter loved. On Hoax, it is just exploiting them no matter what they do - if they want something from their daughter, then they’re selfish and greedy, and if they take a stand and let her go off and do her own thing, then they “lose”. The only way that this show can finish without both the producers and the daughter coming off as completely sleezy is if it turns out that the family knew about the hoax the whole time and were just acting, and then they all get to personally bitch out the daughter for putting money above her family. Oh wait, the daughter would still come off as sleezy, but at least it would be her turn to cry.
It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to keep watching… I can’t stand reality tv, and this may not be the limit
