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Prime-time life won’t help families in realityPosted: 04.24.09 The “octomom,” Nadya Suleman has said she wants to do a reality show about her family’s life. The mother of 14 (the eight newborns and six other children, including three with disabilities) has no husband and has been living with her parents. It’s pretty accurate to say her life since the babies were born has already been a media circus. TLC, which already airs “Jon and Kate Plus 8” and “18 Kids and Counting,” has announced it will take a pass on a show with Suleman and her brood. But that doesn’t mean some other network might not pick up the idea. If you wanted to do a reality TV show on large families back in the 1960s, a TV producer could have driven around Hometown, Ill., where I grew up. Our family had 10 kids, another family in the parish had 15 kids and one of my classmates came from a family of nine children. But Hollywood wasn’t knocking at our doors. Life for any large family is hard enough. Add TV cameras and a production crew, and it can’t make it easier. Whether in physics or relationships, a well-known premise states that observation affects reality – that is, by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality. Once you bring in cameras, the reality is no longer genuine – whether it’s “Survivor,” “Big Brother” or “The Amazing Race.” Some aspect of reality is being changed to make real life into entertainment. Matt Smith, who was one of the five residents of MTV’s “Real World New Orleans,” moved to my parish in Arizona after his stint on the show. He often talked about how the TV version could never represent reality, since the five housemates each lived 168 hours a week, but those 840 hours of combined life had to be edited down to one hour of engaging television. By necessity, the producers chose the elements that made the best television, those with conflict and high drama or comedy. With that in mind, how would Suleman and her 14 children benefit from a constant life in the eye of the TV lens? These are children who – with octuplets in the family, being raised by a single mother with six other children – already have a few things going against them. Born prematurely, two had birth weights under 2 pounds; only one weighed more than 3 pounds at birth. Life will not be easy. Will adding a TV audience and all that goes with it really improve their lives? Can these children possibly consent to their involvement in this? Can we expect that their mother, who engaged in in-vitro fertilization and had six embryos implanted (two of which split into twins), while unmarried with six children at home, will make decisions in their best interests at all times? Speaking via satellite Jan. 18 to the Sixth World Conference on Families in Mexico City, Pope Benedict said that it is through one’s concrete experience in the home “that one learns to truly live and value life and health, freedom and peace, justice and truth, work, harmony and respect.” One would think it’s hard to have that kind of concrete experience in the home if there are bright lights, cables and TV cameras omnipresent. Families as depicted on TV, whether in sitcoms or reality shows, are entertaining but not realistic. Ward and June Cleaver don’t live here. Neither do Marge and Homer Simpson. They never did. “Truth, work, harmony and respect” have a better chance of happening if the TV cameras aren’t watching 24/7.
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