Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Fiendish fun for the whole family, from "The Amazing Race" to "Arrested Development" to "Everybody Hates Chris."
Oct 16, 2005 | Family matters
Here in America, nothing's more important to us than family. We spend the first 30 years of our lives trying to shake off the twisted dynamics and toxic undercurrents of the families we were born into, and we spend the second 30 years of our lives building families with twisted dynamics and toxic undercurrents of their own. (The third 30 years, if we're lucky enough to have them, are spent eating roasted nuts and taking comfort in the fact that most of our mistakes and messes are somebody else's problem now.)
This process not only perpetuates the status quo, it keeps the American economy afloat. For the first 30 years, we buy stuff to set ourselves apart from our families: baggy pants, tattoos, Chingy CDs, psychotropic drugs, etc. The second 30 years is when we get our lawn mowers, our sectional couches, our deluxe baby strollers and our spa treatments. During the third 30 years, we become demographically undesirable, this because we spend most of our time flipping through 10-year-old copies of Time magazine and watching "Touched by an Angel" reruns.
When you look at our lives through this very simple yet informative lens, through which we're revealed to be either fleeing from our family members in horror or horrifying our offspring, you have to wonder why we continue down this ill-fated path. Why can't we stop the madness? Wouldn't we all feel better if we could just ignore our families and stop making new ones?
Maybe. But then, how would we spend all of our time? I mean, it's fine for George Clooney, who can just fly a new shipment of whoring sea donkeys to his Italian villa once every few months. But for the rest of us, or at least the unimaginative majority of the rest of us, giving up on the divine tortures of family would mean that we'd be left to our roasted nuts and our old copies of Time and our "Touched by an Angel" reruns 30 years ahead of schedule, all without the satisfaction of knowing that, somewhere out there, a little grandchild is being raised in a manner that's a direct and equally wrongheaded reaction to our own misguided notions of parenting. I mean, really, where's the fun of retiring without having created countless messes for somebody else to clean up?
Whiny, snappy people holding hands
And so, the cycle of life continues! Recognizing the barbarity of family life, the producers of "The Amazing Race" (9 p.m. Tuesdays on CBS) created a "Family Edition" of the show this season, and the results have been downright breathtaking. Instead of the usual bickering couples and bickering friends, they invited 10 teams of bickering families to race around the world in pursuit of that million-dollar prize.
Can't you just hear the naysayers over at "Amazing Race" headquarters that fateful day when the family edition of the show was pitched? "It'll get too ugly," one of the girls from marketing said. "We can't get kids involved in this competition -- it'll stunt them for life, plus it's unsafe," a development executive added. "Will people really want to watch stressed-out families, taking it out on each other?" a publicist chimed in.
I'm willing to bet that all of those naysayers were still in the first-30-years Flee From Family stage. Thankfully, though, the other executives in the room that day were old enough and wise enough to treasure the notion of being able to laugh at other people's tweaked family dynamics. After all, what better way to shake off the stresses of creating an unhappy family of your own, than by watching someone else's unhappy family imploding as the cameras roll?
Still, even the procreators in the room couldn't have imagined just how rich and sublimely entertaining the emotional meltdowns of "The Amazing Race: Family Edition" would be.
Naturally, they handpicked an Italian family to be the first fall guys for family dysfunction. Following in the rich tradition of hotheaded Italians on TV, the Paolos seemed happy to pick up where the Barones and the Sopranos left off. The two sons are impatient and downright mean to their mom and each other, the mom is whiny and meddlesome and has no clue how to back off and give her kids the space they need, and the dad is disconcertingly passive and quiet. Delightfully enough, every single week the Paolos explode into hysterics and name-calling and teary recriminations. It gets so ugly that it'll have you rethinking your assumption that it's healthy for families to express their emotions openly.
On the other hand, the Godlewski family, consisting of four sisters from Illinois, do a nice job of embodying the drawbacks of killing each other softly. All smiles and squeals and sickening sweetness for the first few episodes, the Godlewski sisters had me wondering if they really were sisters or if it was all a sham. But next week, we're promised that the gloves will come off -- in the preview, the sisters are shown screaming at each other mercilessly. "Thanks for making me cry, you guys!" one of them bellows, and another snaps back, "You did it to yourself!" Awww, they really are sisters after all!
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