The All-Pilot Project: Stylista & Secret Millionaire (Jan 6)
The Poop: You know what? This show is not good. It’s possible to make a good reality show that holds my interest based on a premise about which I know nothing. Take Project Runway for instance. I don’t know anything about fashion. To a large extent, I don’t care. And yet, I love Project Runway. Weirdly, the approval of Tim Gunn is now deeply important to me. How many cooking shows do I watch? A lot. Can I cook? Not at all.
Unfortunately, they don’t put any effort into making life at a fashion magazine look at all interesting. Heck, the first task is all about getting breakfast for Anne Slowey, which is really just an opportunity for here to criticize the contestants for not knowing about her specific tastes. Of course, they don’t give the contestants any guidelines, so they’re really just putting together a plate of food for a crazy lady. Is there any way a rational person could be expected to know that “Melon should never touch any other fruit”?
I have no doubt that a good show could come from this premise. If they had contestants who really fretted about things like page layout and color palettes that could have been interesting. Instead, the contestants run to the deli and snipe at each other’s outfits. They spent more time arguing about sleeping arrangements than they did actually working on the challenge.
Also, the contestants are all basically awful people. They hate each other and they’re boring and petty, and I don’t want to see them. You know how every season of every show has the one contestant who’s just a butthole? That’s everybody on this show.
The Prognosis: Well, the series is over, so it’s not like I have the opportunity to watch it again, but now I’m secure in my choice of ignoring it. It’s a boring show about boring people. Farewell, Stylista. You sucked, and I don’t miss you.
Secret Millionaire
FOX
The Premise: Millionaires live undercover among poor people and try to make their lives better. Poor people do not question why they are suddenly being followed by a camera crew.
The Personnel: Nobody who stands out. I feel like FOX uses a lot of the same crew on their reality shows, since so many of their series look exactly the same. So yeah, probably the same people who brought you The Littlest Groom had a hand in this.
The Poop: OK, they managed to wrangle some goodwill right off the bat since the first episode is set on Imperial Beach, which made me think of John from Cincinnati.
This show is well-intentioned, or at least exploitative in the kind of way that comes off as well-intentioned. The thing that has to be mentioned is that it’s so fake. We’re told that anybody who encounters the Secret Millionaires is told that they are part of a documentary on poverty. But the fact is, as soon as people are on camera, they act differently. You’re not yourself. You’re going to treat poor people with a camera crew differently than you would treat regular poor people. So what we’re seeing isn’t reality – it’s the way people are actively choosing to portray their reality.
Further, certain situations and props are clearly set up by the network. The “Help Wanted” posting that the millionaires answer is not only missing any contact information, but it’s lettered in the font that Secret Millionaire uses for its onscreen captions. Plus, the way some “unscripted” conversations are filmed indicates that there are multiple takes, or at the very least that somebody is shooting reaction shots separately. That certainly blunts the emotional impact that they’re going for. And of course, the Millionaires ask a lot of questions that an actual poor person wouldn’t ask. I can’t imagine anybody being fooled by their story that they’re impoverished. People who don’t have a place to live aren’t generally astonished when they meet somebody who doesn’t have a place to live.
It’s sad, because TV doesn’t generally take time to deal with the genuinely needy. I just don’t think the best way to do that is with fabulously wealthy people who get to go back to their mansion in a couple of days. (Morgan Spurlock’s take on the same subject in the premiere of 30 Days was more interesting, simply because of the longer time and the lack of network fakery.) The struggles of the impoverished come to us through the lenses of the rich, who are more astonished by the simple nuts and bolts of poverty than by the actual reality of their situations. It turns the needy into props, and while the Millionaires ultimately end up giving away $100,000 (split up among the various people that they meet), it’s really just exploitation. Rather than looking at the root causes of poverty, as Spurlock did, they’re giving three or four people a quick fix. And for those people, it’s a great, life-changing thing. I’m not going to dispute that. But there’s so much more good that could be done by really looking at what’s wrong with the economy. Instead, Secret Millionaire isolates individual problems, which lets us go away thinking that there’s a happy ending. FOX, while managing to look altruistic, is actually cheapening poverty.
The Prognosis: There’s something legitimately creepy about using real people’s pain as a prop for a reality show. And watching millionaires try to break people’s desperation down into a percentage in order to figure out how much of the network-determined money should go to them is even worse. This is manipulation at its worst, and the whole thing is pretty gross.
