Thursday, March 04, 2004
UPN's The Life Of Quiet Desperation
UPN Show Is Called Insensitive to Amish
Oh, there was nooo denigration in The Simple Life. Everyone was treated with the utmost respect and decency.
As for Specter and Santorum, clearly they watch much less tv than even the Amish do. "We know of no other reality series that singles out the beliefs and practices of a specific group of people as a subject for humor"? "Singling out the beliefs and practices of a specific group as a subject for ridicule" is UPN's mission statement!
Shouldn't Dynamic Duo Specter and Santorum be too busy fighting crime and defending the sanctity of marriage against all those college-rockers in the Portland area to worry about this?
And does UPN honestly think the Amish are as interesting at two slutty girls with more money and less intelligence than anyone in the audience?
Repeat after me: piety does not make good television. |
We couldn't do the `Beverly Hillbillies,' " Leslie Moonves, the CBS chairman, who also oversees UPN, told television critics and reporters in January. But the Amish, he joked, "don't have quite as good a lobbying effort."
Mr. Moonves may have been mistaken. Within the last few weeks a campaign to stop the show has been started by lawmakers, rural groups, Pennsylvania Dutch tourism officials and representatives of the Amish.
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UPN, in a statement in response to criticisms of the show, denied that the series sought to demean the Amish and said it would depict them with the "utmost respect and decency."
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Fifty-one lawmakers, including Pennsylvania's two United States senators, Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, both Republicans, have sent a protest letter to Mr. Moonves and Mel Karmazin, president and chief operating officer of Viacom.
"We know of no other reality series that singles out the beliefs and practices of a specific group of people as a subject for humor," the letter said.
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"I think it will be somewhat interesting, but, yeah, this will not be denigrating in any way," Mr. Moonves said. He added that the idea behind the reality show was "fish out of water," similar to Fox's "Simple Life," in which two rich and pampered young women, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, worked on a farm. "This is in a certain way a reverse version of that," Mr. Moonves said.
Oh, there was nooo denigration in The Simple Life. Everyone was treated with the utmost respect and decency.
As for Specter and Santorum, clearly they watch much less tv than even the Amish do. "We know of no other reality series that singles out the beliefs and practices of a specific group of people as a subject for humor"? "Singling out the beliefs and practices of a specific group as a subject for ridicule" is UPN's mission statement!
Shouldn't Dynamic Duo Specter and Santorum be too busy fighting crime and defending the sanctity of marriage against all those college-rockers in the Portland area to worry about this?
And does UPN honestly think the Amish are as interesting at two slutty girls with more money and less intelligence than anyone in the audience?
Repeat after me: piety does not make good television. |
