The Latest and Lowest Media Spectacle
by Kieth Merrill

If progress is measured by “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire,” where in the heck are we?


Did you see the wedding? Did you succumb to TV’s titillating invitation to share the sacred vows between two complete strangers? Have you laughed or cried over Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell? It was the most celebrated marriage of the new millennium and certainly the best attended. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you have been on the real Starship Enterprise where no man has gone before. I’m talking about “Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire,” the latest and lowest media spectacle on FOX Television.

Progress is usually thought of as a forward, movement. Something about moving onward, even upward. The academic definition of progress affirms the notion that progress is about improvement. “A gradual betterment, especially the progressive development of mankind” according to Mr. Webster.

I am fond of ending e-mail with a gusty “upward and onward”. Admittedly, it as a faint reflection of my faith in eternal progression. The notion of getting better forever is appealing to me and expressed by lofty thinking. “Lofty” to me means upward and onward.

In a film I made called Take Down the main character Nick Kilvitus (Lorenzo Lamus) listens with rebellious disdain as his English Teacher cum coach, (Ed Herman) explains. “Everything changes, Nick. It either goes forward or it goes backward, but nothing remains the same.” In most cases I’d need electrical shock therapy to remember dialogue from a movie made so long ago. For some reason that bit of wisdom has stayed with me. Today it prompted me to ask a serious question of our maddening mess of mass media. If social evolution is measured by media we have to wonder which direction we are going? If progress is measured by “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire”, where in the heck are we?

If you planned your life around the insipid special you may be a mindless lemming marching to the sea to drown en masse. If you thought about it, but watched it anyway you are probably the type of person who would never miss a circus sideshow that promised a two-headed calf and a boy with a hand growing out of his stomach. If you proudly boast “I never watch such drivel” but peeked in just the same, then they got you! You’re a victim of media hype, albeit, not so innocent. If you missed it by conscious choice put a gold star on your forehead and buy yourself a new CTR ring. You deserve it.

Let’s settle the question of my judgmental piety. I would have watched, but I heard about it too late and actually forgot. I ignore most mass media and hardly ever watch TV so I was spared by ignorant bliss. No gold star. Keep the old CTR.

Unfortunately it is almost impossible to ignore dumbness of such magnitude, even when it deserves disdainful disregard. Media thrives on our apparently insatiable appetite for the sordid and scandalous. We are enticed deeper and deeper into the enchanted woods of the unseemly.

We go willingly into the wonderful wasteland of television because we feel safe. We feel safe because we presume to be protected by that hard wall of phosphorescent glass. But where our eyes and ears go our mind follows and our spirit is led.

Dorthy Swanson, president of Viewers for Quality Television asked, “Is this an all-time low in the viewing taste of the American Public?” Clearly rhetorical, Dorthy’s question can be answered, “not really, there are many others wallowing in the bottom of the trough in search of the all-time low.”

“Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire is a ridiculous-hopefully harmless– example of the lunacy of the LA elite who conjure up such chuckleheaded ideas between cocktails and dinner. This embarrassing underbelly of Hollywood was obviously spawned by the only slightly more enlightened offering “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on ABC. It may be an illicit child, but the parentage is not in question. FOX TV executive, Mike Darnell, (37) who came up with the idea openly admits it was an attempt to ONE UP the remarkably successful “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on ABC. It’s a high stakes game with audience share as the prize. Audience share means money and the Hollywood heart of popular culture pumps green blood.

The worry of course is where will it end? The bigger worry, will it end? When we gleefully participate in a spectacle that is-at best– a resurrection of P.T. Barnum’s tawdry tastes and-at worst– a perversion of our most sacred social institution what becomes of the boundaries of our tolerance? Have we already obscured the limits of what is morally acceptable?

Ellen Goodman who writes for the Boston Globe commented, “when Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire ended with vows, a dismayed sociologist said that you “could hear Western Civilization crumbling.” It is hard not to think about, –if not actually compare-today’s increasingly sensational and graceless entertainment to days of yore when people “tuned in” to watch others fight to the death or be eaten by lions. What is it about us -at least 22 million of us–that tolerates, encourages and ultimately embraces such witless nonsense served up as entertainment? With news as entertainment leading the way, protected by the sacrosanct shroud of the first amendment, “reality television” has taken an awful toll on quality programming, good taste, privacy, propriety and dignity. Jerry Springer will undoubtedly find profound inspiration in the blatant assault on the sanctity of marriage in the endless game of ratings. With the announcement by WWF of the new XFL (professional football league) it was hard not to see the writing-or is it blood– on the wall.

So I wondered today, where are we? Gratefully there are vastly more important and hopefully more meaningful ways to measure the progress of humankind than mass media and icons of popular culture. Those of us caught up in movies and media forget of course that by most standards we are nothing more than court jesters, dancing in our silly hats until the laughter fades and we can be forgotten. I hope at least that most of what we do to crack the walls of culture is forgotten. Unfortunately, the cracks remain.

Looking back is a sign of getting older, and I’m not ready to admit to 54. But if we’re supposed to be making progress, why is so much of what we’ve done in the past so much better than what we seem to be doing now?