Queen for a day sucked! Extreme Makeovers sucks! TV is not any worse - there’s just more of it.

My “sneering, self-congratulatory rudeness” is actually repulsion by the total lack of any sort of “reality” in this type of “reality TV”, where people are showered with an insane level of extravagance that’s just totally out of whack. It’s one thing to install an expensive elevator for a wheelchair-bound kid who’s never had a second-floor bedroom before, but quite another to give each kid in the family their own expensive and gaudy theme bedroom with their own wide-screen plasma TV (in addition to all the other expensive frills they get that 99% of people in this country can’t afford). It just seems to be such a misguided, ostentateous, and self-congratulatory effort to “help” people.

Remember the single father of 7 from Camden, NJ, who recently put his huge new EHM house up for sale because he couldn’t afford the increased upkeep and taxes? It just all seems like sickening wretched excess that sets the recipients up to fail - and to stand out from their neighbors in a bad way that just has to cause some alienation. The show justifies the grandiosity because the recipients have survived hard times of various sorts, but they’d do better with a practical, fitting, and less-insanely-blinged-out house and a nice little trust-fund nest egg with the extra money.

Here’s a link to The Smoking Gun where they uncover the show’s “wish list” of diseases and misfortune they’re looking for.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0327062extreme1.html