Who's Your Daddy?

As most of you know, I usually have nothing but scorn for reality TV, but then again, I don't ever have to sit through promos for most of it because I TiVo most of the series dramas and comedies that I watch and skip the commercials...but, with football, I watch all of that live. And, since I watch FOX on Sundays every week to see NFL games, I must suffer through inordinate amounts of promotions for their shows, which is fine when it's "The Simpsons", but not so fine when it's for promos for "Nanny 911." (This is a real show? And, isn't there a second nanny show on ABC or CBS????)

But, much like "Joe Millionaire"--still, in my mind, the greatest idea for a television show in my lifetime--I was intrigued by a FOX reality show due to it being pounded into my skull: "Who's Your Daddy?" It seemed like every Sunday, the geniuses over at FOX corporate kept showing ads for this thing, a shocking idea in its own right--a one-time reality show where an orphaned woman tried to pick her real father out of a lineup.

That's right, friends. They made a fucking game show out of an orphaned girl's life, complete with prizes if she picked her father out of the eight men posing to be her father.

Let's back up for a second. FOX made this 90-minute special based on the life of TJ Myers, a fairly attractive 30-something white woman that you feel bad for right away. This is for two reasons:

Someone convinced TJ that in order to find her father, she should agree to go on national television to run this silly gauntlet to pick her father out from other men that she (obviously) has never met before. Someone must have actually uttered these words to TJ: "Don't worry, this will be fun! You'll find your father at the end, and by guessing which guy is really your dad, you'll learn a lot about yourself and the man that abandoned you 30-odd years ago."
TJ has maybe the most tragic-looking makeup I've ever seen on a reality-show participant. I hated to admit it to myself (and by "hated", I mean "loved every second of it"), but it looked like someone took their makeup phaser, set it to Whore, and aimed it right at TJ's face. Yes, that is a joke from "The Simpsons."

Okay, so here's the real setup--TJ rolls up to this LA mansion, where the eight men posing as her father have been assembled. Another one of those vaguely-40-years-old, probably-a-former-Revlon-model reality-show hosts takes TJ by the arm and introduces her to the eight guys that are trying to prove they are TJ's dad. TJ--who, again, has never met her real father--loses it, crying now and throughout the 90-minute program...er, FUCKING GAME SHOW, wondering which one of these guys is her biological father.

At this point, I still can't believe that FOX had the cojones to turn this into a game show. The girl's never met her real father! Why would she ever want to find her dad this way? This, in my mind, just barely eclipses that show FOX did last year with midgets falling in love, called "The Littlest Groom" or something bad like that.

Anyway, about the eight guys--all eight look like they really might be TJ's father. At least, that's what I thought until I realized that FOX should have really been cruel and introduced one or two Token Reality Contestants. Seriously, "Who's Your Daddy?" would have had instant cult status if a couple of the dads were black or Asian. How funny would that have been during the intro? "TJ, I'm Tyrone from Long Beach, California...and I'm your father." Or "TJ, I'm Takeshi, from Irvine, California...and I'm your father." Then, they cut back really fast for her reaction, something like

I had no idea my dad was Japanese!!!

THAT, my friends, is comedy.

In typical reality show style, "Who's Your Daddy?" goes with an eliminator method where the eight guys get cut down to four when TJ is forced to decide which of the eight faux-dads might really be her dad. To ensure that her real dad doesn't get cut, the group of four men that includes the real dad advances to the next round (meaning that if Real Dad was amongst the four guys that TJ didn't think was her father, that group would move to Round Two). Naturally, TJ made the right picks in Round One and in Round Two, when four dads were cut down to two.

And this is where the money thing really ticked me off. Being that this is a game show, TJ would receive $100,000 if she picked her real dad from the group of dads that she thought might be her dad. (Still with me?) If she picked wrong, the illegitimate dad would win the $100,000 and TJ would receive some diminished sum, like $75K. TJ has waited her whole life to meet her father, and FOX dangles $100,000 as incentive for her to pick right? At one point, TJ--who was in the military and I have to imagine didn't do this show to make any fuckin' cash--visibly gave the former Revlon model host lady a nasty look when the money was mentioned, as if to say

Bitch, maybe you need the money to revive that print advertisement career of yours, but I'm here for my daddy!

Twenty minutes into the show, four dads were gone, and by the end of the 55-minute mark, two more dads were gone, leaving TJ with just two men to choose from. I'll admit that at this point, there was some real drama involved; one of these two guys fathered this woman 30-odd years ago and left in an undisclosed situation during the Vietnam War. Having known two women that were orphaned and had the chance to reunite with their biological parents in their mid-twenties, there is real drama to be had here, if FOX can somehow pull it all off.

Then, the high command over at FOX went into high gear. They allow TJ to have a late-night meeting with each of the two final contestants to ask them just one question: why did you abandon your daughter and put her up for adoption?? One of the two finalists is acting, so you know that someone is going to put up a great acting job to convince TJ that he didn't mean to leave her in her infancy, which makes for good television...until you realize that we're talking about a real person here, so this is going to hurt TJ in some way as she watches a man act his way through why he put his supposed daughter up for fucking adoption!!! How did they get these guys to be in this show??? Wow, this was the hardest part of the show to watch. Sure, it was awful, and maybe even a little demeaning to TJ...but it was great theater!

After all of this, TJ has to make a selection. Who's her real dad? There have been a steady stream of tears up to this point, from TJ and from her supposed fathers. So, when the actual reunion happens, the boys over at FOX do a good job of not overdoing it, letting the moment speak for itself. But, the real money shot comes with the great ending of "Who's Your Daddy?"--it's "Who's Your Momma?"

We get to meet TJ's real mom. This was the really meaty stuff of the show; you've got like seven people in the room crying, I'm watching and I can feel a little trickle, you can imagine people on the set and the director all losing it, too. It was one of those moments that absolutely can't go wrong, and you find yourself in TJ's shoes, saying to yourself, "Damn, these are my freakin' parents! These are my freakin' parents!!!!" and you almost can't believe you have never met these people for your whole life.

Naw, it wasn't "Joe Millionaire"...but, thankfully, it wasn't the "Joe Millionaire" sequel, either. I have a bad feeling that FOX will find some way to give us a "Who's Your Daddy? 2" sometime this fall, but in the meantime, this wasn't a bad little special after all.

bellview--TiVo eternal

"Who's Your Daddy?"