The Blinking Blue Schoolmarm

Of all the culinary pairings devised by man–tomatoes with basil, foie gras with truffles, french fries with ketchup–is there any more perfect than TV with junk food? The Super Bowl and chili! Cartoons and Froot Loops! The Survivor finale and a pitcher of mojitos! Like hot dogs at the ballpark, those sugary, fatty, liver- and heart-hostile delights simply taste better bathed in a glow of blue light. TV is not just a medium. It is a seasoning, a condiment, a secret sauce.

The network TLC, however, is out to bust up that long and happy marriage. On each episode of Honey We’re Killing the Kids! (debuts April 10), nutritionist Dr. Lisa Hark visits a family with bad eating and exercise habits. The money scene comes when Dr. Hark leads the parents into a stage that looks like a medieval catacomb and shows them, on a giant TV screen, computer projections of what their kids will look like at age 40 if they keep gorging on sugar and fried food. In the pilot, the parents watch, horrified, as their three sons morph and swell into pallid, pimply, ill-groomed tubs who look vaguely like serial killers. For some reason, the computer model assumes that junk food motivates men to grow bad facial hair.

Dr. Hark then puts the family through a radical three-week boot camp that makes for high drama. (Because really, what better motivation to eat well than watching a kid throw up rice and bok choy?) The beauty of Honey is that it wraps its voyeuristic fatsploitation in sanctimony. Dr. Hark is a classic media moralist in the tradition of Judge Judy and Dr. Laura–curt and no nonsense. (Could Dickens have come up with a better name for a TV scold than Dr. Hark?) After a few minutes of her lecturing–“They are on a downward spiral toward disaster!”–I was ready to eat a deep-fried Snickers dunked in whipped cream just to spite her.

But the most dissonant, if not flat-out traitorous, aspect of the show is its attitude toward TV itself. “Rule No. 1,” Dr. Hark declares: “Limit television! No more TV whenever you want!” Does she make a good point about the danger of too much sedentary time? Absolutely. And it would be easier to take seriously if Honey didn’t use every manipulative TV trick in the book–sensationalistic special effects, trumped-up drama, Grand Guignol music–to keep you in planted front of the screen. In words that Homer Simpson once used to describe alcohol, this is TV anointing itself as “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!”

Honey, however, is hardly the only example of puritainment out there; there is an entire genre answering some unspoken yearning of viewers to have their TVs whip their decadent couch-potato butts into shape, or at least to watch it happen to someone else. Nanny 911, Supernanny, The Biggest Loser, Celebrity Fit Club, Wife Swap, Cold Turkey–in all of them, someone comes in to impose “tough new rules” on participants who stand in for us in weak-willed lumpy America. Lose weight! Quit smoking! Be a better parent! Millions of Americans gladly, masochistically sit down to be lectured by their televisions about the very vices–gluttony, laziness, inattentiveness to loved ones–that they bought televisions to indulge. If there is one thing we love more than TV, it is being ashamed of loving TV.

Now, as a TV critic, I know well that childhood obesity is a serious problem and that TV abets it. I don’t forbid my sons TV–my 20-month-old’s favorite verb is “Pick!,” squealed delightfully when it’s his turn to choose a video–but I limit viewing time and choices. There is probably no parent more annoyingly judgmental about TV than one who watches it for a living. (My 4-year-old, though, is unimpressed by my argument that The Doodlebops is a derivative pastiche of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows of the ’70s.) We avoid commercials. We also read books, visit museums and go to the park. And I would no sooner put a TV in my child’s bedroom than I would buy him a bong for Hanukkah.

But as a grownup, when I sit in front of the tube, I don’t want it to improve me. I want it to spoil me. I want it to love me uncritically. I want that generous box, which showered me in my blissful childhood with brain-rotting, violent shows like Speed Racer and Spider-Man, to give and give and expect nothing in return. Let me have my little, guiltless moment of pleasure. I have the rest of my life to be virtuous, and the rest of eternity to be dead.

Honey We’re Killing the Kids! is aware of that last fact–as its title confirms–and, to its credit, it wants to help kids live longer. I hope it does, although I have to wonder, as with a crash diet, whether its extreme regimen can stick. In the end, it’s easier for me to defend Honey as entertainment, which is what it finally, absorbingly is. I could hardly move during the first episode, watching with rapt attention as Dr. Hark worked her diet-dominatrix magic, while I ate an overstuffed salami and mortadella sandwich with cheese. It was delicious.