The Maudlin Depravity Searchlight Hour

So, ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" is looking for the most saddest bastards in the USA to feature in their sappy, sacchariney, triumph of the heart, good-ol-American values shmaltz fest expo palooza con. Producer Charisse Simonian puts out the request for poor, poor freaks of nature suffering from such exotic diseases as progeria (the afflicted looks like an old man as a kid), ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and/or anhidrosis (the afflicted cannot feel pain). Or, a family that has multiple Down's Syndrome cases would be great for ratings gold, too.

I love how naked her ambition is to pack her shitty little ABC fuckfest with the most pathetic images you can zap out of a cathode ray tube. My only problem with it is why stop at diseases that perhaps only 20 people on the planet suffer from? Why not pan for the truly horrible-slash-imaginary? Cast that large net out and look for some dude who is in the actual process of being anal-probed by grey aliens. Find someone suffering from a bleeding Loch Ness Monster bite. Or, dredge deep for that one guy with Kreuzfeld-Jakob, a syphillitic, encephalitic disease one only comes by from eating the brain tissue of someone else afflicted with it.

I can see it now: A ten-minute segment to set the story up; ten more minutes to show people stoning the insane afflicted to death and consuming the delicious yield of his buttery brainpan (you get extra credit if you catch the diners picking dura mater membrane -- thick, rubbery brain-sheath –– from between their teeth); another five minutes for the consumers to come down with psychotically degenerative brain dysfunction; and the remainder of the show goes to giving their house new cedar shingles and a plasma HDTV to wile away their last drooling, frothing, agonizing hours.