LAST EDITED ON 01-11-05 AT 09:25 AM (EST)

Enter fuming.

The tape is in the VCR, ready to run. The opening credits have been cued up. The bedrock at the bottom of the pit is oddly smooth under my hands. And yet, I can’t start the tape. Not just yet.

Let’s talk about the show’s concept first.

For those of you who somehow missed all the ‘so this is the last sign of the apocalypse’ stories in your local newspaper, the idea behind this little FOX effort is as follows. Today’s victim will have no idea who her birth parents are. She will have been adopted at a very young age, never found any information on her genetic contributors, and she will have been searching for a long time. FOX has found her father, and is set to introduce them to each other. And all she has to do is sort out the real sperm donor from eight men who will be paraded before her while they claim to be her father, one hoping for a reunion and seven looking for a cash payout.

Right. If darling daughter can through hook, crook, and close examination of facial contours, pick out her actual father, she’ll receive a reunion and $100,000 to help pay for the massive amounts of therapy she’ll be needing very soon now. If she gets it wrong, the best liar in the group receives the hundred grand, and, this being FOX, her father is presumably given a court order to stay two thousand miles away from his offspring at all times, which will at some point put him in the middle of an ocean, where he’ll promptly drown.

Isn’t this special.

Let us, just for a moment, ignore the daughter’s potential DAW factor. Let’s look at her as a person. Someone searching for her parents, because people do dumb things when they’re looking for their roots. And that includes applying to be on a FOX reality show, which is just about as dumb as it gets. If someone, anyone told you they could find your father when you’d failed, you just might believe them. You’d sign on for anything. You’d even consider going to Spike. You would…

This is hitting a little too close to home. If only by proxy and the weakest one-remove possible, I recently went through this. One of my dearest friends met his birth parents not too long ago. It wasn’t the long, hard slog that these contestants went through: his parents checked off that vital box that says ‘Please relay inquiries to me, and I’ll make contact’. But it was an emotional wringer, and just making the decision to try the initial reach was one of those things that shreds your heart from the inside out, and I got to watch it every step of the way and it hurt like hell. From one-remove.

So let the record show that the normal sarcasm displayed towards reality shows, generated from an odd sense of affection as much as anything else, is no longer in play. The summarizer is entering the field as a hostile witness. The jury has found the defendants guilty and the judge has announced the sentence: we’re all just trying to figure out what’ll be the most fun way to carry it out.

The defense may now present its case to have the sentence commuted to death by rabid squirrels. Roll opening credits.

And it’s time for The FOX Family Values Hour, as cute, heart-warming pictures of babies and their creators flash by while a deep voice intones the special qualities of the bond between a parent and their child, much like the special qualities of the bond between the FCC and Howard Stern, because the child is always presumed to be inherently bad and must be punished at all times. Bad child! Ruining Mommy and Daddy’s time out at the clubs!

Of course, some parents solve that problem right away through a very simple maneuver, as T.J. Meyers can tell you. TJ, a slightly-off-conventionally attractive blonde of indeterminate age and with some hard-used miles showing around her eyes, was given up for adoption at birth, letting her parents get an extra ten years of disco nights in. And while she was one of the lucky ones – adopted at six weeks – having parents who wanted her didn’t get rid of her curiosity over the ones who gave her up.

‘Separated a lifetime from each other,’ the FOX voice intones, ‘does the bond between parent and child still exist?’ I’m going to say no, because I know more than a few families who’ve spent their entire lives together without getting any bonds beyond the legal. If you need evidence, please consult CBS every Saturday night at eight p.m. EST for the next five weeks.

We are then introduced to TJ’s Blur, as her fuzzed-out, voice-distorted father starts to talk about how he never wanted to give her up at all, because an infant is just the perfect accessory to oversized gold medallions, plus it’s so cute when they try to teethe on them. This is followed by seemingly endless precaps for a ninety-minute show that’s going to ultimately wind up as a one-time special and has already lost all but six viewers, five of whom are too stoned to follow the plot, and then the FOX voice intones ‘Tonight, we’re going to find out if blood is truly thicker than water –‘ blood is seawater, look it up. Except in the case of FOX producers, where it’s acid ‘—and learn the answer to the question – Who’s – Your – Daddy.’

George Steinbrenner. But thank you for asking.

The credits end, and we’re introduced to the host as shots of Generic Reality Mansion 8.2 move across the screen. (As always, the mansion is the priciest part of the show, renting at $50 an hour. The California real estate boom/bust is single-handedly responsible for most of this sewage.) The person who will forever after carry this crap stain on her resume is Finola Hughes, who has both of the qualifications for hosting a horrible FOX program: a slight accent and a face-first collision with the BoTox truck. And she thinks Generic Mansion 8.2 is the setting for the most dramatic and emotional reunion show ever, at least until the internet as a whole shoves her pre-surgery photos at her and reacquaints the hose with her original features. Denial and tears and lawsuits: now that’s a reality show. But we’re watching Who’s your daddy, so the good stuff will have to come later.

Finola switches to talk about TJ, saying ‘We’ve recreated this woman’s difficult search in a way that lets her get to know her dad before being finally reunited with him.’ Right. So apparently TJ’s previous search method was to go into a bar, approach eight random men who looked to be the right age and start making overtures, all of which were taken the wrong way. No wonder she’s had to search this long and stoop this low. But on the plus side, imagine how many free drinks she’s gotten in her lifetime.

It’s time to see some post-drunk logic, so we’re treated to a few segments of TJ’s audition tape as she talks about her life. As said, she was lucky enough to be adopted at six weeks – but her parents got a divorce when she was twelve. She’s always felt like she didn’t quite belong unless she knew who her birth parents were, and one of her aunts once told her any opinion coming from TJ didn’t count because it was an adoptee’s opinion and they should all be taken out and drowned at birth, so as to be less of a drain on the government and lower taxes on the rich. Oddly enough, the aunt’s name was Penny. Go figure.

The camera shows pictures of TJ as a child, infant, and teen – cute kid – as she talks about her confrontation with her aunt being a turning point in her life, and the reason she started her bio-parents search in earnest. Most of her searching was done between the ages of 16 and 24, to no avail. All she was able to learn was that her parents were very young when she arrived (bio-dad was 18 or 19), there was some difficulty in getting them to sign her over (noted on the medical records), her father was present for the birth, and he was in some branch of the military. And all this minimal information is courtesy of the incredibly restrictive, frequently asinine data concealment laws that cloud the early days of adopted children in pretty much every state in the union, creating thousands of heartbreaks and making it possible for shows like this to exist. And if that isn’t a good reason for legal reform, name three better ones.

TJ notes that she went into the military herself, signing up for a hitch in the U.S. Army, which is something often done by people looking for some sort of structure and substitute family unit in their life, especially if you come from a divorced household and you’re used to have people screaming in your face for hours on end with no good reason. But now she’s out, and looking to move on with her life – and the first big step is getting the questions from the earliest part of it answered. That’s why she’s here.

Maybe this really isn’t DAWing after all. Maybe it’s pure desperation when all else had already failed…

Psst!

Huh?

Psst! Estee! Over here!

…who?

It’s me, Devious Weasel.

Oh. Um… DW – how did you get into my apartment?

I didn’t. You’re fictionalizing an Email exchange we had the other day into a conversation for purposes of information relay.

…right. If you say so. Is there some reason you’re breaking into the middle of what’s promising to be my worst summary to date?

That would really be saying something.

Thanks.

I just wanted to tell you TJ wasn’t being completely honest about her job history.

She hasn’t worked at Belly’s?!?

Better than that. I checked salon.com and the summary article Webby posted, and got the real dirt. Go over to her website for a minute and surf around.

Okay – loading it up – oh.

See? She’s a low-tier softcore porn star. Kind of D-list for the hard R stuff and single-X stuff.

I can see that.

I guess that’s something else which people who are looking for structure in their lives like to do.

DW…

That’s what happens when you hang around in bars getting free drinks from men who might be your father. An object lesson for us all.

Thanks, DW. I’ll be sure to bring that up.

Did you see the portion of her credits where she mentioned having played Martha in Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolff?

Yes.

Isn’t that the funniest, most ironic thing you’ve ever seen?

No.

Do you want to discuss the dramatic unities again?

Goodbye.

Meanwhile, back at the actual show, TJ is being driven up to the mansion, confessional-telling about how many emotions she’s feeling. Happiness. Fear. Nervousness. Anxiety. Worry that her father’s already seen her in some of her best work without knowing it was her at the time. Serious worry that her father’s seen her in some of her best work while knowing it was her.

Finola meets TJ in front of the door, takes her hands, and asks her if she’s available for a quick experimental-style date after the show. After receiving a definite maybe, she then switches to asking if TJ is ready for one of the most emotional moments of her life.

‘Yes.’ (pause) ‘Am I holding your hands too tight?’

‘Yes! They’re broken!’

Must have been some interesting scripts in those films… anyway, Finola informs TJ that her father is behind the front door, and asks if she’s ready to meet him. The answer here is predictable, emotional, and verging on unbashable, so let’s fast-forward to the point where the door actually opens.

Eight men come out and array themselves on the front steps. Allowing for different amounts of sun exposure, the occasional ‘you just look so young for your age’, and varying amounts of plastic surgery, they’re all in the right age category to be TJ’s father. All from the approximate Caucasian subdivision, so no freebies. No male versions of her face, but, in one of those ‘oh, you casting (censored)’ moments, every one of them has something that reminds the viewer of TJ: chin shape, nose, something around the eyes, forehead height, cheekbones – but not too much of anything, which means that ‘find the features’ isn’t going to work as a solo baseline tactic. Cute, FOX. Really cute.

TJ gasps and starts to cry – and you can understand why. She’s never been this close. One of the eight men in front of her is her father: guaranteed. She’s looking at him right now. As of this moment, she has seen one of her parents, and there’s nothing in the world that can change that fact.

For their part, the men are doing some of the greatest acting ever committed to film in a FOX series. Teary eyes. Hard swallows. Twitching lips. Expressions of pure pride in their genes, which were able to produce someone who could easily enter softcore. They’re looking at TJ with paternal warmth, or deep happiness, or, as TJ’s father says in confessional blur, a desperate attempt to restrain himself and 'not go running down the steps into her arms.’ There’s also the occasional bit of ‘I’m glad she’s not my daughter. That means I can so totally get her’, mostly expressed by teary eyes and hard swallows.

Maybe they’re thinking they can get their copies of Bloodrayne autographed.

Thanks, DW.

Any time

Go home, DW.

Landru likes me better than you.

Go. Away.

As TJ cries, some of the men cry, and the more susceptible members of the audience start to tear up (all three of them reacting to the hard drugs), Finola explains that TJ’s father was found through www.reunitetoday.com (posted here because this show is not their fault and the URL might be able to help someone, unlike FOX), and they confirmed the find through a DNA match. There is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that TJ’s biological sperm contributor is among the eight, and they even got the Simpson jury to sign off on it. All hopes for My Big Fat Obnoxious Bio-Dad are immediately flushed down the toilet. (Too bad. Imagine the reaction to the punchline.)

The men begin to introduce themselves with their name, hometown, and a universal finisher of ‘and I’m your dad’ as the theme from To Tell Who’s Lying Scum plays in the background. If this was a multi-week series, I’d spend some time introducing each of them to you, describing their physical appearance and what aspects of their somas are a match for TJ’s, breaking down their reactions to seeing her, and even looking at their posture and any leaning forward as if about to make a run towards her for a hug, because we’d all be part of a month-long mystery and looking for clues all the way. But this’ll be over in eighty minutes and no one will ever care again, so let’s skip that part. They are Carl, Scott, Charlie, Peter, Ray, Rick, Jerry, and Sam. Very few of them could be porn actors gone to seed, even if their first names and bad suits are already pointing in that direction. None of them claim to be from Scottsdale, Arizona.

In c-t, TJ admits to looking for the most honest emotional reactions – Scott and Charlie – and the person suppressing the most emotion – Sam, who kept looking at his feet. So she is going in with some kind of game plan, even if she’s too choked up with tears in main camera time to look like she’s the least bit capable of executing it.

What happens next is one of the best reality show exchanges of all times.

Finola: ‘Now you’re going to get to know all these gentlemen a little better and get one step closer to reuniting with your father. Let’s go inside.’

TJ: ‘I totally didn’t hear what you just said, but okay.’

A cocktail party has been set up inside the front hall: four tall tables and a couple of drinks, two men at each table. TJ will have a chance to share a drink with each man (oooh, flashback) while asking them a few questions and ‘do some detective work’ – which will be made a little harder by FOX having briefed all the men on the minimal information TJ has concerning her biological father. Finola leaves her to the first stop on the Scooby Doo, Whose Pup Are You? tour, which gets a semi-desperate reaction of ‘She’s leaving me!’ from TJ when the host heads out the door. When you’re clutching a FOX host in time of crisis, you know all your emotional anchors have been cut.

TJ goes up to the first table – TJ and Sam – and begins to check her potential fathers out. Her potential fathers, in turn, begin to check her out.

The first step in the detective work is an attitude match, because we all know that how we feel about things isn’t a personal choice: it’s passed down on the X chromosome. So TJ asks her prospective fathers to name their biggest passions in life.

‘Honesty.’ (‘I’m on a reality show about lying.’)
‘Poetry.’ (‘I’m on a reality show about people who might have reproduced, but I would have been young at the time.’)
‘M&Ms, but I had to give that up.’ (This resonates with TJ, as they’re also her favorite candy.)
‘I love to explore the soul.’ (‘I’m not your father and I’d love to explore your dress.’)

TJ’s also using the face-to-face time to examine the men’s features, looking for any really specific matches to her own. This leads her to cast an early vote against Rick, whose face has a more angular shape and who also says the things he likes least are ‘cheaters and liars’, which really brings up the question of what he’s doing here. Vibes are also playing a part, and during any interview where TJ feels she’s not with her father, she can be caught glancing around the room while the man is talking. Searching. And while she’s doing that, the men are looking at her open-front dress. Searching.

Scott gives off a particularly gregarious aura, to the point where TJ c-ts ‘That was either an Academy Award-winning actor – or my father.’ (And the odds of FOX hiring an Oscar winner are a little bit low.) However, in rough paraphrase, ‘But then I thought, what if he’s not my father? What if I’m paying too much attention to the wrong guy and ignoring my father and he’s really offended by that and he walks off the show and I’ll know who he is but I’ll never see him again! This is so stressful! Why couldn’t they have just given me the address of the website when I applied for the show?’

Finola comes in to announce the end of the party, and the start of the first elimination: TJ will have to pick four men to send home, tonight. However, it’s not immediate – the men can go enjoy a buffet while she’s working it out – and, in a twist of surprising humanity for a FOX show, TJ cannot eliminate her father. The method behind this will be explained later.

The men head to the buffet, TJ goes upstairs with Finola, the softcore script for that event goes right out of your head, and TJ’s father blur-talks about being jealous of the other men, who were trying to be a father to his little girl. Don’t worry so much, bio-dad: at least half of them weren’t intending anything – fatherly.

TJ is placed a desk with three monitors and a joystick control for the cameras hidden around the buffet room. She’ll be given some time to examine the men without their knowledge while she makes up her mind about who to send home. Finola also adds that none of the fake daddies know who the real one is, and in fact, she doesn’t even know herself. (Clueless contestants, clueless host. Welcome to Forever Daddy.)

Finola stays for a few minutes to do her other job: confusing TJ. This is done by providing Too Much Information: there’s three monitors to look at, the controls to work, and a billion little bits that could be clues coming in at all times. TJ is starting to question whether her father would necessarily have the same favorite foods as she does, but Finola insists that she look at what’s coming off the buffet table. Scott takes an early lead by taking ice cream, and Charlie jumps out to a huge one by taking chocolate ice cream and putting the cherries (which TJ hates) aside – but then drops back to the pack by eating the cherries last. TJ is confused. So am I. What sort of D-list softcore star would hate cherries? Maybe she just couldn’t master that trick with the stem.

TJ answers a couple of quick questions from the host – she got the least emotional resonance from Peter and Ray, the soul-explorer – and then receives a quick hug from Finola (who may even now be applying for Who’s Your Softcore Industry Sponsor?) before the host announces that it’s decision time. She’ll leave now, TJ will sit in the room and pick out her four elimination choices, and come down when she’s ready. TJ announces that she’ll see Finola in five hours, and resumes her vigil.

‘Which one are you?’, she half-whispers to herself, staring at the images. And just for a moment, her having consented to being on the show doesn’t matter, and her profession never mattered beyond the jokes it could set up, and I hate FOX with the force of a thousand detonating letter bombs. She’s hurting. The days this show takes will be the hardest of her life. No one, no one, has the right to string someone along like this for any reason. (Censored) FOX programming executives.

Fortunately, the moment passes quickly, as the men array themselves on the steps of a gazebo outside the mansion, and TJ comes out so that Finola can ‘walk me through the process of choosing four men who are not my father, and four men who are my father.’ Apparently TJ’s recent script choices have given her some odd ideas about procreation.

The process is simple: TJ will separate the men into two groups: ousted and survivors. Whichever group contains her father will remain, period: TJ will not be allowed to send her father home by any means during the game short of complete alienation or a list of her future screen projects. However, if TJ’s father is in the ousted group, the prize money for the end – remember the prize money? – will be reduced to $75,000. Oh, and there’s only one division here, otherwise TJ could play light coin/heavy coin and solve this on the first night.

TJ, a little emotionally shaky again and afraid of mortally offending her bio-dad by getting it wrong, starts on her choices. In shorthand:

Sam: seemed to be repressing emotions on first sight, but out.
Charlie: didn’t get much of a reaction from him on the steps, but changed her mind during the cocktail party. In.
Carl: looks like someone she thinks her mom, whom she knows nothing about, would have chosen. In.
Jerry: confused about the vibes she was getting from him. Out.
Rick: something about his smile is either paternal or Sugar Daddy, so until she figures out which it is, in.
Peter: stands tall with a military bearing and has her skin coloration, but the vibes are wrong. Out.
Ray: shares the most features with her, but something’s not ringing true. Out.
Scott: different from what she expected, but the hangdog eyes are saying something she wants to hear more of. In.

(Insert dramatic pause here.)

Finola tells TJ her kept group is the right one. TJ bursts into tears again as the men who are staying smile, nod paternally, and look proud – and seeing that, TJ exclaims ‘One of you is my father! After all these years… I heard you tried to look for me. Thank you!’

Which means I’m very glad one of the most nauseating parts of the show is up next: the eliminated men introduce themselves by their real names and professions, and some of them takes the time to wish TJ luck in her quest. None of them declare themselves to be actors. They’re all working men with more conventional jobs, whose only real motivation in being here was to fool a desperate woman in search of her origins into thinking they were the answer to all her questions, and getting a hundred thousand dollars for being the one who could best break her heart. And yet, they feel they can, with a straight face and no moral qualms at all, say they’re glad she eliminated them and they hope she eliminates all the other fakes. One of them almost starts crying. Know what I call that? Sour grapes. They can’t have the money, so none of the other liars should get it, either. The perfect Survivor jury has just left the building. And yet, TJ is so dazed that she not only congratulates some of them on their acting ability (especially Ray, whom she almost picked and who admits he was ‘working it’), she thanks them for coming. Poor, desperate TJ…

Finola congratulates the survivors, tries to send TJ off to bed – she doesn’t want to go: she can’t take her eyes off the remaining men and there just isn’t enough time – and we move to the next morning, with TJ in confessional, talking about her final four.

The problem for TJ now is first impression versus second. On her first sight of all eight men, she was immediately drawn to Scott, who seemed to be the most emotional, the closest to tears with a few actual drops escaping, and she thought that reaction indicated the closest connection: i.e. Bio-Dad. But at the gazebo, she saw something else. Of the four survivors, one stood there quietly, shoulders squared, eyes crinkled, nodding slightly and smiling, as if to say how proud he was – and that was Charlie.

‘So that’s my instinct,’ TJ tells the confessional camera. ‘Now watch me be totally wrong.’

Finola meets TJ in the kitchen and gives her one little piece of information about her biological father: he used to be a very good disco dancer in his younger days, good enough to win a contest. (This shocks TJ, whose dream job as a little girl was to be a Solid Gold dancer.)

DW, don’t even think about it.

So TJ will be taken to a local disco club that doesn’t look anything like someone made over one room of the mansion in an incredibly cheesy way because there are no surviving disco clubs for a thousand miles, and she’ll have to try and get all the men onto the dance floor to see if anyone still has their moves. TJ, still feeling very dazed, feels this is fun, and the camera takes a spin around the exterior of the mansion so no one will possibly suspect they’re all just climbing up to another floor.

The disco club consists of a dance floor, a couple of curtains, some chairs, a rotating ball, and nothing else, just like all the better surviving disco clubs in America. TJ’s grand plan, which is the same one used by all women looking for their bio-dads in all the better surviving disco clubs on the second floor of generic reality mansions, is to play teacher and show the men a few disco moves which she just learned herself off-camera five minutes ago. (This isn’t a problem because if you’re a softcore star, you learn how to master changing body position to the orders of a script just from reading the stage directions. That’s twenty percent of the job skills and sixty percent of the plot.) However, she quickly learns that she’s teaching the most hopelessly rhythm-challenged group in America: Caucasian males in late middle age. No one claims to know how to count music and steps, no one seems able to copy her first eight movements, and the situation turns into ‘You’re all hopeless, aren’t you?’ within a minute. And that’s with all of them playing along. The only mercy being shown here is our total lack of Gus, and Rick’s gut is already moving a bit out of tune.

In fact, in the name of mercy, here’s a very short freestyle dance summary.

Charlie: Some moves, very ‘dear’, kept his knees together a lot.
Rick: Baby elephant chicken dance.
Scott: Best rhythm of the men, had some idea what he was doing out there.
Carl: Attempted to hit himself in the back at least six times. Succeeded four.

TJ swings into a c-t full of confusion. She’s not getting the right vibes from Rick, plus there’s the whole happy-go-lucky-twitching-mass-of-human-flesh thing. Scott and Charlie had the best moves, but at the moment, she feels the most resonance from Scott and Carl, whom she felt was giving her the ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to stay here’ tolerant look. Which could also apply to a liar. She’s insecure. She’s tormented. She’s standing under the rotating ball, thinking hard, and disco is still dead.

Night falls, and Finola brings TJ to a computer setup. She’s going to have a chat session with her father, who’s hidden somewhere else in the mansion with another system. They can talk about anything they like, excepting the obvious (what he looks like, which name he’s using). It’s not meant to hurt her at all, really, even though all of the men will read the transcript so they’ll all have the same clues. It’s just that the show’s emotional manipulation quotient wasn’t high enough yet. And this little instant message session is sponsored by absolutely no one, because no service wanted to be associated with this show, and who can blame them?

Finola gives TJ some privacy, and the session begins with her bio-dad posting ‘Hi, Sweetheart!’ on the screen. (It’s also the riotous return of Mr. Exposition Hands, as the camera occasionally shows the typing on the other end from the forearms on down. I guess he needed the extra salary, as the ivy wall hasn’t shown up much this season.) TJ replies with ‘Tell me what I need to know’ – but the clue search quickly turns into something more personal, as do the questions. Her bio-dad called her sweetheart the first time he held her. She looks quite a bit like her mother. Her bio-parents aren’t together now, but they were in love when she was born. Their lives went in different directions when he got back from Vietnam. Her mother was a cheerleader. All the little precious pieces of a life that make me need a bashing moment, fast.

Fortunately, one shows up, as her father closes by saying how much it hurt him to see the pain in TJ’s heart when she saw all the men on the steps, and when she was trying to choose. Well, bio-dad, you could have ended this at any time. Still can. Just step forward, tell the legal boilerplate to go melt itself down, and end this emotional torture for your daughter. Now. Burst out of the room, run through the mansion, find her, hug her, tell her you’re sorry. End the show on the spot because you care too much to let it continue. Run, man, run!

Nothing happens. TJ tells him ‘Good night, Dad’, trying not to cry too much. He replies ‘Good night, sweetheart’ over the connection instead of breaking into the room like a real man, and the conversation ends with TJ in still more torture, as he’d mentioned getting her for the dance lessons, which only Rick had said on the floor. Finola, who knows her job as a FOX host, comes by to make it worse: cutdown time. This time, TJ just gets to stare at a flat-screen TV with the frozen images of the contender’s faces on it before she reports to the gazebo. It’s the same process as last time: the group will be cut in half to two, she can’t eliminate her father, and if she gets the picks wrong, it’s the same financial penalty. After TJ spends a few hours hitting herself with the whips that FOX has so thoughtfully provided, gazebo time comes around again.

Rick: ‘I’ll get you for the dance lessons’ as an echo wasn’t enough. Out.
Scott: Best moves and best first impression, but less emotional connection with him on Day Two, and it’s bothering her. Still, he’s in.

(Finola interrupts with ‘There are two men left’, and it’s a wonder TJ wasn’t given a bowl full of DNA sample vials to pass out. ‘This is the last cheek scrapping.’ ‘We’ve reached our final sperm donation of the night’.)

Carl: Looked teary and all during the dance lessons, but she’s not sure if he’s playing the game or not –
Charlie: Not only decent moves, but seems like he has a spirit much like hers, plus he smiled and his eyeteeth have the same slightly set-back placement of her teeth, so – he’s in, and Carl’s out.

(insert another dramatic pause, accompanied by cheesy music, here)

TJ’s made the right division again: her father is either Charlie or Scott. The full prize is still within her reach, and she’s down to a fifty-fifty shot with the two men she most strongly suspected from the first day on. The other two give their real names and professions, provide nauseating best wishes, and depart. TJ heads back to the mansion with a last, longing look back. And the camera moves to the next day, with the end of this gauntlet of pain that much closer. (And I’m talking about TJ, not the two viewers who made it this far.)

Finola meets TJ in front of a flat-screen TV, which introduces her to someone who’s going to tell her more about her bio-dad: Don, his best friend since high school. The taped message puts more pieces in the puzzle: her father was on the high school wrestling and football teams, and graduated at a time when young men had to choose college or a chance of being drafted after their senior year. He hadn’t wanted to be randomly forced into a branch of the military, so chose his own. TJ was born just before boot camp ended, and her father managed to get leave and make it to the hospital. The nurse felt her father was going to make a break for the door with an infant in his arms, so put a couple of big orderlies on the exits, just in case. This is mostly a cue for TJ to do some more crying and is treated as such by the camera people, with plenty of shots going to her tears and the oddly little girl-like pigtail braids she’s chosen to put her hair in for the morning. Remember, we’re not going to get TJ to her reunion until she doesn’t have a drop of moisture left in her body and the FOX executives don’t have a gasp of oxygen left in their squeezed-off throats.

Night falls – that was quick – and Finola, whose closeness to TJ is starting to look like the start of something big, leads TJ out to Jackie’s old bench. TJ’s getting one last chance to talk to the men before the big decision, and she’ll be allowed to ask the one question she always wanted to ask her father. She’s thrilled to get the chance. Even though she knows one man will be lying to her, the other will be telling the truth, and she’ll have it at last, even though she had to go on FOX to do it.

Finola leaves. Scott enters, carrying a toy black Labrador. They both sit down. And TJ asks the question: why did her biological parents give her up for adoption?

This, of course, is where FOX (which has really been remarkably restrained so far), chooses to insert the first pre-commercial precap of the night.

(I usually don’t mention commercials, but this one has to be brought up: during this break, and once again later on, a spot for adoptusa.org ran. I’m not sure if this is irony or a really weird form of product placement. Hey, parents, in twenty years, your adopted son or daughter can be on this show, too!)

After clearing the shilling, Scott gives his answer. TJ’s mother didn’t want the pregnancy to be the way the marriage began, not with Scott heading to Vietnam and possibly never returning, and TJ’s mother unable to raise an infant on her own. The mother made the decision, and Scott went along with it in the end. There hasn’t been a day that went by where he didn’t think about TJ, he looked for her, he’s glad she looked for him, he’s glad she found him, he’s tearing up, and here: nothing says love like a black Lab stuffy. TJ’s c-t impressed, because black Labs are her favorite dog breed. Not that it would have come up in the interview process or anything.

Exit Scott. TJ sits with the Lab stuffy for a little while, cuddling it. Enter Charlie, carrying a sketch pad. TJ asks the same question. FOX heroically keeps itself from going to commercial.

Charlie gives his answer. He couldn’t get leave from the Marines to attend the birth, but finally forced it out of them when he made it clear it was leave or the brig, no other choices. Her mother was only seventeen when TJ was born. With the attitudes of the period, a teenage mother, a father on his way overseas, and the grandparents shooting down every argument they made towards keeping her, they ultimately felt adoption would give TJ a better chance. He’d also had ‘a dream and a promise from God’ that he would see TJ again one day, although you’d have to wonder if this is what God had in mind. (The Concerned Parents Organization would be very surprised to hear reality TV was an instrument of Hir will.) His gift to TJ is a sketch he’d made of her before he ever saw her, based on what he imagined his daughter would look like. It looks like – charitably – the head of a human female, if you squint a little, turn the contrast way up, and ram your head into the screen as hard as you can.

One of these men is a lying bastard. The other is a spineless coward.

Charlie leaves. TJ hugs the sketchbook, looking thoughtful, and the scene shifts to the mansion’s interior, with TJ and Finola sitting on a couch in front of still another flat-screen TV, which is displaying pictures of the remaining men. Decision time.

TJ is terrified of making the wrong choice, because she thinks it’ll look to her father like she didn’t care about the results. Her heart would break. Her father would be let down. The money is never mentioned, and not even Finola wants to bring it up at this point. Doesn’t stop me, though. One hundred thousand dollars. That’s not even worth a single ‘brak’.

TJ reviews the clues. With Scott, it’s all about the emotions he’s been displaying, tearing up almost on cue. Charlie’s had his share of emotional connections, too. But there was something else. Something I’m going to deliberately misplace in the episode, because the editors completely messed it up and I know better than they do. For starters, I would have known better than to make this show in the first place.

‘I know who my father is’, TJ declares – and Finola takes her outside, back to the original door. TJ can say a few words, and then she’ll address her father by name. The door will open, and regardless of who she’s picked, her father will be there.

TJ speaks. She’d had her suspicions since the cocktail party. She’d seen the pride in her father’s eyes. She’d listened to his words. But the clue, the misplaced clue, the vital clue, was there at the disco dance. TJ was in the Army, her biological father, the Marines. At the end of the dance lesson, she saluted the men. The drill sergeants ram that into you at bayonet point. The angle of the elbow, the way you hold your hand, the speed it’s tossed off at. One man – only one – executed a military-crisp, perfect salute. You can’t help it. You don’t know how to do it any other way.

She calls for Charlie to come out, and he does.

For a few seconds, there are no words.

Her biological father says the right and wrong thing in the same sentence, asking her to forgive him for all the pain he’s put her through. TJ proves she’s her father’s daughter by also says the right and wrong thing at the same time, forgiving him. (I don’t, not entirely. Although I am placing most of the blame on FOX.) Charlie rightfully sees his daughter’s words as the most important of his life, and the tears continue to flow.

Once again, Finola knows her job and breaks in, calling Scott out to take his final bows as the lying bastard he was all along. Oddly, TJ chooses to accept his best wishes and a hug instead of going for his throat – she’s kind of dazed right now – and then lets Finola lead her and Charlie inside for the denouncement.

TJ made three correct divisions, so the full 100K goes to her. Her bio-dad is married with three daughters between nineteen and twelve – and here they are, looking a little awkward and unsure of what to do about having been saddled with a sister who’s older, blonder, and on an infinitely larger percentage of videotapes than they are. This is followed by a short tape showing pictures of Charlie and TJ’s biological mother, Bobbi Jean, during their days together prior to TJ’s birth.

This, naturally, is followed by Bobbi Jean’s entrance.

And that’s the moment when the last pieces fall into place. Mother and daughter hug and cry, father standing with hands clasped in prayer in the background. You look at the parents and you see the child. There is no doubt possible. The genetic legacy is clear. These are TJ’s birth parents. And the emotions are real.

Torture with a satisfying ending remains torture.

I understand, from the articles surrounding the show’s airing, that eight of these episodes were filmed, with seven more people being put through the emotional torment of whittling their potential parents down to one. I also understand that FOX found about three dozen parents – so they took the twenty-eight orphans who weren’t going to be filmed and reunited them, period, straight out. And I thank them for that.

But for putting TJ through days of pain – for the show’s despicable game show elements – for once again thinking that real human torment is a source of entertainment – I cannot support them in their choice to film and air this. Good came of evil, but evil was in the original intent. If FOX wants to go out and find birth parents, then reunite them with searching children on television, do it. Talk shows did it for years, before they switched to ‘I slept with eighty men and didn’t think to get a blood test from any of them’. The moment when a family comes together is one of the best TV can offer. But get rid of the money. Get rid of the games. Get rid of the liars. This is your father: hug him for as long as you can. The ratings will be there, and higher than they would ever be for this.

And for pity’s sake, do something about that stupid name.