American Orphan: A Season Recap of Hollywood’s Latest Reality Show Success

America’s top-rated show, American Orphan “the show where you decide who gets parents, a home and a future” — has wrapped its first season, with outcomes that no one expected. In the ratings race, American Orphan beat out its sister shows (American Psycho — “the show where you decide who gets released from solitary confinement, prison and their criminal record” — and The Special Bachelor “the show that’s like The Bachelor, but for disabled people”) with the season finale as viewers across the nation gathered with philanthropic intent to cast their votes and decide which of America’s favourite homeless children would go live with a nuclear family.

The season, which started last November with twenty-four emaciated orphan children competing for the love of an all-American family, became a bloodthirsty battle of wills and wits. As the weeks dragged into months, competition grew fierce, especially in the weekly skill challenges where only the most obedient, most doting and most dry-eyed children came out on top.

For the first twenty-two episodes, a panel of housewife judges decided which children would move on to the next episode, and which would be sent back to the orphanage or street corner from which they were plucked. It wasn’t until the finale that Americans got the chance to exercise their democratic rights and decide who among the final four destitute and shoeless children would get to savour something other than the putrid taste of defeat and gruel.

But the drama-packed final episode left viewers in tears — and some in a rage — when what began as a block-building challenge to win the immunity idol (a stuffed poodle companion named Sandy) took a turn for the violent as group bully Andreas Gonzalez hurled a particularly sharp-edged block into the face of the crier of the group, Maddy Westminster.

Westminster was forced to forfeit the challenge — and the show — with a detached retina.

But the child abuse didn’t stop there, as the three remaining orphans battled it out in the playpen in a live wrestling match sponsored by OshKosh B’Gosh. Gonzalez was the first child to tap out in the playpen after Shemar Hall and Berta Yogathin wedged Gonzalez’s head between the wooden bars that encaged the children. The double-teaming of Gonzalez, a Puerto Rican-born babe whom producers discovered on the streets of San Jose, ignited race riots from Manhattan to San Diego as America’s less-progressive male population battled it out in real life with Latin American immigrants who saw in Gonzalez the potential of the American dream — and the betrayal of that dream in his defeat.

With Gonzalez out of the contest, it was Hall’s blue eyes and pink cheeks that captured voters, who shunned the frail Yogathin and her crooked teeth.

Not since the defeat of Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election had America so uniformly rejected a human being.

But even the drama of watching Yogathin’s four-year-old heart break in prime time was overshadowed by earlier judgements that sent other fan favourites back to a life less fortunate than most. The fate of six-year-old Janey Lynn, sealed in episode 14 when she failed to complete a timed dishwashing task when her hands started blister, caused a wave of debate on call-in radio shows across the Midwest.

Lynn’s defeat — and subsequent suicide — troubled the judges, notably soft-hearted mother of seven Edina Vincent, who later quipped on Oprah that sending Lynn back to the orphanage was the hardest decision the judges made over the course of the series, adding “we had a profound love of Lynn’s delightfully pinchable cheeks.”

Other fans of the show will surely look back fondly on the efforts of Sheldon Xu, the Chinese-born orphan found abandoned in the back alleys of Okalahoma City, who displayed his endurance in episode 8, when he held back his bawls after being exposed to highly frightening movie murder scenes — a challenge that left four orphans wetting their beds that night.

“I was biting my tongue really, really hard. I think I tasted blood,” recalled Xu, who at eleven years of age was the oldest contestant on the show.

But Xu’s fortunes turned in episode 18 when he failed to stitch together a pair of shoes fast enough to satisfy the guest judges from Nike, who sponsored that week’s now-infamous child-labour challenge.

Competition among the remaining contestants grew increasingly desperate in the closing episodes when, in an effort to keep the children emaciated and ornery, two-time Emmy-winning producer Harry Pinecrest opted to cut each child’s daily ration of congealed oatmeal from three spoonfuls to two.

So will there be a second season?

“There’s no doubt about it,” Pinecrest boasted. “The viewers will get what they want: More tears. And maybe, just maybe, some blood and guts.”

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