The Charity Appeals - Where's the Drama?

Saturday, March 7th, 2009, 5:37 pm

Since none of these celebrities, as far as we know, needs a job with The Donald, the appeal with the celebrity version of The Apprentice is the money won for charity.  Important, too, is the exposure each charity gets from being featured on national television.

But how well are these charities represented?

I don't mean "represented" in terms of whether the celebrity is a worthy spokesperson.  That's a discussion for another day.

What I mean is, how well does each celebrity sell his/her charity in the video appeal for support?

I remember, early in the first season, being struck by how personal some of the connections between celebrity and charity were in some cases ... and how relatively flat and impersonal others were.

For example, Piers Morgan's sponsorship of The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund was centered on his brother and brother-in-law's service in Irag and Afghanistan.  Trace Adkins' selection of the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network was inspired by his daughter Brianna's fight against life-threateningly severe food allergies.

Most of the others, however,  failed to hit the sweet spot.  While both Carol Alt and Gene Simmons worked for children's charities (the Tony Alt Memorial Fund and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation), neither articulated a clear personal connection (Alt's "my late brother really loved children" notwithstanding).

A lot of times, the candidates fell back on the tired "it's a great organization and it helps a lot of people" line.  Not exactly a Unique Selling Proposition.

It seems odd to me the producers of a reality TV show would show a real weakness here.  After all, this species is especially notorious for emotional manipulation in the name of "good TV."

Clearly, Mark Burnett's crew can starve, sleep-deprive and slave-drive a bunch of fake job candidates into dialing up the drama for the camera. So how come they can't coach these same people into dialing it up for something that really matters?(I do have to say, second season seems to be doing better in this regard than first  -- most of the appeals have better emotional "hooks."  But that doesn't mean there's not still room for improvement.)Just because nobody asked for my opinion doesn't mean I'm not willing to give it.  (I'm nice that way.)  So here's what I'm suggesting:

Don't just name it, describe it.  Okay, I think we all understand the basic concept of cancer, so Tom Green is off the hook (in more ways than one).  But Rett Syndrome?  Never heard of it.  No idea why it would kill someone.

And while Clint Black makes the personal connection with his 16-year-old niece's death and makes a passing reference to how often it's misdiagnosed, I walk away from Clint's video as uneducated (and, unfortunately, uninspired) as I was when I hit the play button.

I'm not asking for a bunch of medical terminology here.  And I'm not expecting some long gut-wrenching tale about someone's illness and/or death, either.

But I think Vincent Pastore hit just the right note, albeit not in his charity appeal video.  After Hydra won a challenge under his leadership, Vinnie said briefly that his charity, the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, raised funds for the disease that killed his daughter's stepfather, a man who had been healthy as a horse but died within months after diagnosis.  It was emotional without being maudlin.

Why you?  Why them?  Why this?  When there's a family connection, the answers to those questions are fairly obvious.  Absent that, an explanation is in order.

"Explanation," however, may be too weak a word here.  "Picture" is more to the point.

Annie Duke's appeal for her charity, Refugees International, isn't bereft of heart-tugging pictures: hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Sudan, huddled together in ill-equipped refugee camps without food, medicine or pure water.

But when Annie said she had a real interest in the Sudan region, I sat up, expecting a personal story to explain that connection.  Has she visited the area?  Is she acquainted with any of the victims or aid workers?  What put this area on her radar?

We never find out.  That's a shame.

In contrast, when Trace Adkins talks about the "mad dashes" he and his wife have made to the emergency room with their daughter, it creates a vivid mental picture of panicked parents and a suffering child.  You understand why he wants to raise money for FAAN -- and you want to help.

It's just as important to get a portrait of how the charity is helping.  Piers Morgan's visit to the Center for the Intrepid -- "They make prosthetics that enable amputees to run.  To run." -- succeeded in illustrating what those hundreds of thousands of dollars were going for.

It made you feel good about participating -- as a viewer -- in what otherwise would be just another television show.  And isn't that the point?

Tags: celebrity apprentice

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