If you haven’t seen this show here’s Wikipedia’s blurb on it.
Happened to channel surf into this show by Fox last Tuesday to hear a young lady tell America that her Dad ruined her childhood. Camera switches to Dad’s stony face. She wins $100,000 and jumps for joy. Camera switches to Dad’s stony face.
I could hardly believe what was happening. I was so gut wrenched for the Dad. I was so disgusted by the daughter. I was so angry at Fox and in contempt of the segment of the public that urges Fox on.
I can ignore Jerry Springer. If you want to watch his show, whatever. But to allow and encourage people to commit emotional suicide and murder should not be permitted . I’m not a fan of censorship, but I’ll take a pass in this case.
I’ve never watched any show of this ilk because the whole concept of it gives me the willies (Trash someone else’s life and profit!), but I’ve just always assumed that those type of promos are from families in cahoots.
I mean, I figured it was entirely possible that the entire thing was a lie and the daughter and dad a team probably taking the big bucks to the bank.
Yeah, so gut-wrenched for the dad who agreed to go on this abortion of a show, knowing exactly what the format was. :rolleyes: Sorry, but anyone who’s willing to go on national television and air their family’s dirty laundry for an audience of dribbling neanderthals doesn’t deserve the least bit of sympathy. These attention whores love this shit; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t go on the show in the first place.
“Emotional suicide and murder”? Get a grip. You sound like you might be smack in the middle of the show’s target demographic.
Why? I don’t watch the show because it seems lame, but from what you said, so what? If he really ruined her childhood, fuck 'im. If she lied to win the money then they’ll probably share it and everyone walks away happy.
3- If she is telling the whole truth, how is talking about it on national TV going to help resolve the relationship or help her get on with her life?
4- If she is telling the whole truth, think of how many people she’s just humiliated who are innocent (siblings, children, his friends, etc.)
$100,000 is a lot of money but after taxes and the like it’s not a LOT of money. It’s not even necessarily life changing, unlike destroying her family relationships on TV.
When Dr. Phil had his famous “No bum fights on my show!” meltdown (I’m sure it’s on YouTube) I was thinking “My god what a sleazy exploiter of the desperate! And the guy who makes bums fight for cash is sleazy too!” This show (from what I’ve read, I haven’t seen it) sounds like it’s kind of the Venn Diagram overlapping space of the bum fight/Dr. Phil audience.
This just in: there are numerous people in the world for whom money and attention are worth far more than class or self-respect.
[sub][stupid cartoon parrot]I think I may have a heart attack and die from not-surprise[/scp][/sub]
This kind of show is just so much masturbation, IMO. Andy Warhol said everybody would have 15 minutes of fame. People have turned into attention whores and yeah, I think a lot of them are in cahoots.
I want to know what the long-term repercussions are. Kids are growing up thinking that the way to resolve disputes is to air dirty laundry in front of millions of people and assassinate each other’s character. Nice. True or fake, there’s a stigma associated with what people see and it doesn’t always wash off so easily.
Worse, though, is that the media pander to it. Censorship on TV is far weaker than it was when I was growing up, so we can’t count on them to self-police. I expect it to get worse.
Well now, I’ve watched the show a couple of times - for whatever reason when it’s on, NOTHING else seems to be on - not even the PaintDryingChannel, so there you go.
This particular episode wasn’t actually very bad. They asked if her father ruined her childhood. Her philandering father who walked out on her mother when she was 8. She said yes, her dad agreed. Did they need to do it on national television? No, but the guy can’t be particularly shocked by the whole thing.
The other episode I saw had some woman confessing that she had cheated on her current husband, slept with her sisters boyfriend, stolen money from her mom, etc - all of those people were sitting there watching. She lost it all though when she was asked if she thought she was a good person. She answered ‘Yes’, which unsurprisingly, was a lie.
Anyhow - if you don’t like the show, turn it off. Honestly, the questions are never all that personal, or if they are, the answer turns out to be the positive one - eg. Have you ever stolen from your MOM?!?!? Answer - No. Not much drama there. They just try to sensationalize it for the comercials (as if every contestent is a philandering, robbing, cheating, ho-bag.)
Y’know, it’s not just you, but I’m really sick of this argument with regard to shows like this. Sure, there are people like the ones you describe…then, too, there are people who quite rightfully don’t base their self-respect upon what random strangers think of them based on judgements made from watching a 30-minute TV show. I have no particular ambition to riches, but if someone wanted to pay me a million bucks in exchange for some trash-gameshow-watching asshole’s perception of my “class”, then sign me up.
Really, what’s at stake here? The incentive to lie (in the more-outrageous direction) is both huge and obvious. You’d have to be a moron to assume that the people in question actually did all of the things to which they’re “admitting”. The whole show is “hey, I’ll give you twenty bucks to say something embarrassing” writ large…except unlike that dare, everyone you’re saying it to is already in on what’s happening.
Of course, there are going to be a few who assume you must actually be a syphilitic puppy-eating arsonist, just because you said so on TV. If you ask me, the real losers are the ones so concerned about their “image” in the eyes of those judgemental idiots that to preserve it, they’d not only turn down a real chance at improving their own lives and those of their loved ones, but openly castigate others for taking it.
That said, I wouldn’t be willing to lie about anyone who didn’t agree beforehand to accept payment for my doing so. If the father from the OP wasn’t in on it, I agree that it was a shitty thing for her to do.
You’d probably do well to apply this skill to the Fox show as well, as (based on a brief viewing of it) I suspect that both shows offer a similar degree of “reality.”
(Something I believe Roland Orzabal just implied, although I think that’s the first time I’ve seen someone actually defend the camera-whoring phoniness and deliberate assholish behavior that’s infected the television industry’s lymphatic system. For a million bucks you’d make yourself look like a complete fucking moron in front of millions? I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Churchill…)
You’re right, it’s not like television reveals that cause people to be humiliated for fun and profit have ever caused a real murder or anything…
If this is the sort of thing you get off on, that’s good for you. I’ll keep my conscience clear knowing that by ignoring these trainwreck-prone programs I’m not encouraging them to continue. Perhaps one day we’ll all come to the realization that sometimes these shows actually do destroy people and they’ll mercifully go away.
Vinyl Turnip: first of all, you won’t catch me defending the style of TV show epitomized by Moment of Truth, Jerry Springer, or Big Brother. It’s stupid as hell, I have no desire to watch it, and when the networks have proven capable of producing something interesting once in a while, I’d much rather they devote their resources to that than to the tripe they’re making now. I’m not defending the shows themselves, only the reasons people have for going on them.
As for the million bucks, there two problems I have with your argument.
The first is that it takes “looking like a moron” as a foregone conclusion. Logically, from a game theory standpoint, if a show will pay a person large sums of money to say they did some embarrasing things with no verification whatsoever (apart from a bullshit lie detector test), then everyone is best served by saying whatever the fuck and collecting the money for doing so…and everyone ought to know that that’s what people are going to do in that position, meaning that there’s no reason for anyone to believe that anything they hear on the show is true. You implied that much yourself. If we’re all agreed to that much, then why would I look like an idiot for maximizing my returns, when the only downside is saying a bunch of shit that everyone should know better than to believe in the first place?
Following from that, then, the only people who ought to think I’d look stupid for doing this are: the people who believe everything they hear on TV, and the people who think I should care what the people in that first category think about me. Furthermore, both of these categories are under the impression that you can make value judgments about a person’s worth based on gameshows. Simply put, fuck them; they’re welcome to think what they want.
Hell, I’ve been ignoring the input of judgemental dipshits for most of my life…why should I turn down an offer of substantial payment to continue doing so?
Except that if you lie on this show, you don’t win any money. No question that the daughter feels that Dad ruined her childhood. (If you trust polygraphs)
I can’t fucking stand the things, and never watch them. I don’t know how or why you would have inferred anything else from my post, unless you deliberately misread it.
And, despite your one example (out of how many thousands of these shows?), i stand by my point that anyone who agrees to go on these shows (whether they are the humiliator or the person being humiliated) deserves just about whatever public humiliation they get. Anyone who hasn’t learned by now what is involved in this sort of show is a dribbling idiot, and doesn’t get sympathy for being an attention whore.