And I have seen Hell, and it was on Lifetime...So I had a pretty shitty weekend. Went to the Eagles game (they got F'ed in the A), lost in fantasy football, saw "American Gangster". And although "Mighty Joe Young" is on TBS right now and things are improving, what I really wanna do is vent right now, so I'm going to turn my attention to the disturbing fascination the Lifetime (television for women) network has started to develop for psychic shows.
There was a terrific episode in season six of "South Park" that dealt with Jon Edward, who was the popular television psychic around that time. I won't go too deep into the episode, but it basically showed that Edward was using cold-reading techniques to trick people into believing he had a special power. At the end of the episode, he gets taken aboard an alien spaceship and brought to an intergalactic awards ceremony, where he wins the honor of "Biggest Douche in the Universe", to his whiny chagrin. The best part of the episode was actually the commentary on the DVD of season six; most of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's commentaries are uncensored and hysterical, but this one was particularly special. Parker explained why he believes that people like Jon Edward, who fake telepathy and profit off of the misplaced beliefs of others, are the absolute worst people in the entire world, and he was dead serious about it. Parker says something to the degree of, "there is nothing worse that you can do. Nothing."
I used to think that Parker was exaggerating, but after watching the first episode of "America's Psychic Challenge", now I'm not so sure. The show hurt me and offended me on every level. Usually the only show on Lifetime to do this is "The Nanny". Not anymore.
The basic premise of the show is simple and silly: group four psychics together and make them jump through hoops to see who is the most legitimately "psychic". Already the show is flawed to me. If you're, ya know, legitimately psychic, aren't you just COMPLETELY psychic? In other words, couldn't you just perform all of the activities the show has lined up without breaking a sweat because they all require simple psychic ability, which you apparently possess?
But no. With the use of some wacky voice-overs and tool host John Burke, "America's Psychic Challenge" inadvertantly disproves that none of its contestants are fa real. On the show's first episode, we meet blonde girl Jackie, bald dude Jamie, creepy lady Karyn, and bespectacled gal Zenobia, who all are 100% positive that they are psychic. However, they all fail the first exercise miserably. Burke takes them, like a douchebag, to an almost-empty hospital, and they have to use their powers to guess which one room out of thirty holds a person sitting in a chair. The correct room is 215, and I kept waiting for one of the psychics to walk into the hospital and casually say, "Duh, the guy's obviously in 215." Unforunately, all four contestants guess wrong, although bald dude Jamie is really really happy because he guessed 214, which gets him 10 points. Wait... what? But... he guessed the wrong room...
Later, the contestants are taken to a room with a big wall in the middle, and are challenged to guess which "celebrity" is behind it, using only their minds and a folder with a picture of the celebrity in it, which they cannot open. Okay. The "celebrity" is Lisa Williams, who happens to have her own psychic show on Lifetime! Suddenly I'm thinking, "Oh great, all of these idiots are gonna guess it right, because they're psychic and she's psychic and she'll obviously help them by sending them brain signals." But again I was wrong: not only did they not have to guess what specific celebrity was behind the wall, but all they had to do was vaguely describe this person. Things such as "The eye, I see something with an eye..." and "Something with music, they have some involvement with music" were said. Lisa Williams was impressed: "Yes, I WAS involved in some way with music!" she uttered, astonished. Creepy lady Karyn did not understand the test, so she got visibly frustrated and started standing very close to John Burke. She later professed a deep resentment for the test, begging for me to say, "Hate the player, not the game!" and my friends to eyeball me strangely.
I should at this point mention that, before each commercial break, us TV watchers were given our own psychic tests! One of them featured four face-down playing cards, and a voice-over asked, "Can you locate the jack of diamonds?" Another showed a woman walking down the street and the voice-over smugly prodded, "Where is this woman from? Washington, Minnesota, or New York?" The answers were revealed after the commercial break; my friend got the second one correct, so she left the room to pursue a career using her own psychic ability.
None of the preceding events on the show are very dumb, but none could be classified as offensive. It is unfortunate, then, that the show's third segment tested my faith in humanity as a whole. Like an idiot, Burke led the four psychics to the residence of the Martinez family, whose son had been killed in a drive-by shooting a few years earlier. The family decided that they wanted to reach out to the psychic community, as a sort of last resort to bring the boy's killer to justice. The challenge for the contestants (and I'm not making this up, I swear to you, all of these things happened) was to walk around the residence and use their psychic abilities to identify as much as they could about the death, about which they had been given no information. They each walked around the living room and front yard, closing their eyes and taking guesses about the nature of the death. Bespectacled Zenobia got the closest, saying that the death was a murder that had occurred in the yard, while the other three psychics were pretty much way off. The Martinez family, watching the psychics on a video screen, started tearing up with emotion. They liked Zenobia so much that they decided to bring her back for a private reading, which was (of course) captured for us to see. When asked about whether their son was okay in the afterlife, the confident Zenobia assured them that he was, and that he was very "proud of his family". The Martinez family then asked whether or not the killer would ever be brought to justice, and Zenobia said that she sees a courtroom in the future, and that progress would indeed be made. The family, fully relieved, hugged Zenobia and thanked her from the bottom of their hearts.
This scene made me start to agree with Trey Parker. I don't care if these lying nutjobs want to flaunt their psychic powers in childish little tests (that they couldn't even kind of pass), but why the HELL would you allow people trying to find a little more screen time tinker with the emotions of a family still grieving from the loss of their son? And why would you then broadcast this shit as Lifetime original entertainment?? This is the business of profiting off of the vulnerability of people grasping at straws for answers, and it's deeply shameful. Don't these people secretly know they can't talk to the dead, and that it's all been just an act? How can you do something like this?
After the challenge, two "winners" were crowned, and it was announced that they would move on to the quarterfinals of the show. I'm guessing that this process will be repeated until the show has found someone either legitimitely psychic and all-knowing, or really fucking good at guessing things. But for me, it's already down the drain. Lifetime (television for women), I don't care how many quips you allow Bea Arthur to release on your network, this is just inexcusable. "America's Psychic Challenge" isn't even fun to make fun of... it's just sad.
Although I do enjoy an occasional ribbing of host John Burke. Man, that guy's a dickwad!
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