There’s a tv show hosted by Danny Bonaduce called I’m Exploiting My Kid I Know My Kid’s A Star, which basically sees ten kids competing to be the “next star”. I’m not really sure what they’re going to be a star of, but apparently whatever it is, the winner will be the star of it.

I’ve watched maybe ten or fifteen minutes worth of this show and seen a few trailers for it. In one of the trailers, Raquel aka Rocky (who looks like a wannabe Vegas stripper), the mother of a girl named Hayley, is obsessed with winning that she says the following, complete with finger wagging…

“We have to win this competition. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME????”

And you could just see Hayley tensing up and wanting to run.

The show has segments with the parents speaking to the camera and the parents trash talk each other and and each other’s kids. And there’s an elimination process which means one kid a week gets sent home each show after Danny Bonaduce cuts them to pieces all for the sake of a few rating points.

Seriously, this isn’t entertainment. It’s exploitation.

I can’t believe that all of these poor kids really want to take part in this. More likely they can’t tell their parents for fear of retribution.

They just showed Austin and his dad after they were just eliminated. The father was saying “I’m so sorry, Austin. So Sorry. It’s a bunch of bull****.” as they walked back to their room to get their stuff and the son cut him off saying “Stop. Would you stop talking.”

In the talking-to-the-camera bit in the car, Austin said “I made my friends. I did my performance. That’s all I could do. There’s nothing I could change.”

Hopefully, Hayley will win this stupid show because I fear her mom will tell her for the rest of her life that she’s a failure if she doesn’t. But, if she does win and becomes the “next star” then her mom’s going to control her every waking moment (and probably many of her non-waking moments, too). She loses either way. Poor Hayley.

While googling for some information about this show, I found an article by David Hinckley in the NY Daily News who feels the same way I do about this show.

Oh, and I’m not linking to the show’s website because I don’t want to do anything to support it. May its ratings be less than a test pattern on a local cable channel at 2am.