Another Soul-Sucking Reality Show

Reality shows sort of depress me.  Well, in the interest of full disclosure I like to brag that I never watch them, when truthfully I have precisely two real favorites:  Project Runway and America's Next Top Model.  While the former is cleverly constructed and makes you feel confident that you are learning something with each episode (How to make a dress out of licorice sticks! What material works best for a bathing suit?  Is it better as a designer to be edgy and unpredictable, or classy but boring? Etc.) the latter is nothing but a show about beautiful but whiny post-adolescents.  So, I guess we all need our guilty pleasures.  Anyway, I digress .... 

Have you seen this show advertised? It takes teenaged couples and foists children of varying ages (baby, toddler, preteen, teenager and finally an old person (!)) upon them to see if they have what it takes to raise them properly.  In other words, it's a disaster waiting to happen.  

The Post reviewed the show today, and this just about sums it up:

"Right off, the series shows two structural weaknesses: First, we don't get to know enough about the kinds of couples who would lend their infants to a piece of exploitainment like this; and second, the most hazardous of the six 'Baby Borrower' episodes (and the one that most lives up to the title) is the first, thus rendering the next five installments somewhat anticlimactic."

I guess there's an argument to be made somewhere that the show may have a positive effect on hormone-driven teenagers who might otherwise find themselves in trouble, whether by accident or by pact (horrors!).  

But really, when this show goes up against the lovely array of television options competing for viewers' attention at 8 pm tonight (such as Wild Kingdom, SpongeBob or "Britain's Worst Teeth"), I think it'll be no contest.