TV is the New Reading

‘Great American Dream’ not so great

Yeah, I’ve got a dream.

I’d like to write a television program for the Lifetime channel in which violinist Clara Niedaevalos, 85, takes on a music student and the story unfolds both in Clara’s tiny studio apartment and the grand adventures she had as a young woman in World War II, rescuing her fiance and being a spy and so forth, while the present-day storyline explores her mentoring a young girl in a less-than-ideal home situation.

Sadly, in ABC’s new reality show “The Great American Dream,” my dream would probably go head-to-head with someone else’s dream to develop the next great reality show on Animal Planet – “Parakeet Races!” Think of it! Parakeets perch atop Jack Russell terriers who race around a track chasing a squirrel. Part of the fun is to see who wins, or if they catch the squirrel, or if the parakeets stay on the whole time.

And if the studio audience chose my dream over the parakeets – and there’s absolutely no guarantee that they would – it could still lose out to someone whose dream it was to play ukulele on a Carnival cruise and someone who wanted to be an orthodontist or someone who wanted to send their 8-year-old son to Space Camp.

All of these are legitimate dreams. All of them are probably held by someone. And on ABC’s “Great American Dream,” they’re all put on such a level playing field that a Boston firefighter who wanted to set his wife up as a florist lost out to a man whose dream it was to not be bald anymore.

Dreamy

Donny Osmond, host of “The Great American Dream,” is good-naturedly supportive of everyone’s goofy dream – one guy wanted to establish an amusement park for chickens. The chicken dream lost out to someone who wanted to establish a care center for aging basset hounds.

I only watched the first episode of this show, so I have no idea whose dream ultimately won. After the studio audience narrows the eight dreams described over the course of the evening down to two dreams, the American public is asked to vote for which one they want to see come true. And you can tune in the next night to see which one everyone picked.

While the voting goes on, a low voiceover discusses the fabulous prize packages the dreamers will receive to help make their dreams come true if they win.

Meanwhile, in explaining their dreams and selling them to the studio audience, some of the dreamers can’t help but to take snarky little digs at the other people’s dreams.

The worst of these was a woman who wanted her daughter to be a rodeo queen. Everyone else’s dream – including the firefighter’s – was less important to her, especially the woman she was up against initially, whose daughter had helped raise all sorts of money to cure diseases and just wanted to be a beauty queen.

“Beauty queens are fluff and puff, but rodeo queens are rough and tough,” she sneered, while the beauty queen’s mom smiled through teeth that were fusing together.

I imagined her dream at that moment involved the rodeo queen’s mother and a pot of boiling oil.

Who cares?

And in all of this I’m asking myself “Who cares?”

I mean, this is still America, right? If you have a dream, you pursue it yourself, you develop it yourself. If there’s any merit to it, you’ll probably convince the people you need to that it’s a dream worth pursuing and you’ll get the support you need.

Honestly, in that one of the guys whose dream it was to not be bald anymore made the final cut, I became entirely uninterested in this show.

I’d almost like to pursue my dream just so that it might go up against this nonsense and destroy it in the ratings.

Hey ... a boy can dream, right?

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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