The Rise of Charity TV

New crop of reality programs focuses on helping the needy, but critics say the shows exploit poor people

Charity is coming to the small screen in a big way. The daytime talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey is producing two television shows

that will focus on helping needy people, NBC is developing a program in which real-life millionaires will decide how to give away their wealth, and in September, a show sponsored by Nascar, in which mechanics repair beat-up vehicles owned by charity officials and other local leaders, made its debut.

The phenomenon has even crossed the Atlantic. The Secret Millionaire, a British series that started broadcasting in October, features a wealthy individual who disguises his or her identity and lives in a working-class area to find a worthy recipient of almost $100,000.

These reality shows, so called because they are unscripted and don’t include actors, are part of a growing genre of programs that make doing good — or the appearance of doing good — a key part of their audience appeal.

While not all such shows earn high ratings, many Americans are watching them. The most popular, ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which a team of builders and designers repair the house of a family in dire economic straits, attracted almost 14 million viewers for a recent episode, making it one of the top 20 most-watched TV programs of that week.

Inspiration or Contempt?

The shows are also praised by some scholars and charity officials for inspiring viewers to help the less fortunate and raising money for charitable causes.

Extreme Makeover, for example, has donated part of the proceeds from the sale of its first-season DVD to Habitat for Humanity International, garnering about $50,000 for the Americus, Ga., nonprofit organization.

But some nonprofit leaders give the shows a negative review. They argue the television programs are maudlin displays of good will, and while a few people may benefit from a rebuilt house or some other windfall, the shows potentially exploit for profit those they try to assist.

Kathryn A. Straniero, executive director of Together We Cope, a social-service organization in Tinley Park, Ill., says she refuses to watch the shows for those reasons.

In America, says Ms. Straniero, “we don’t want to put our poor people on display.”

To be sure, television shows that entertain by helping others are not new. During the 1950s and ‘60s, the program Queen for a Day had women tell their hard-luck stories to win dishwashers or other prizes.

But today’s pack of shows differ from Queen for a Day, some observers say, in that they are part of a newfound appreciation for giving in society.

“It’s another signal of philanthropy becoming part of the cultural life,” says Paul G. Schervish, a professor of sociology and director of Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. The programs teach that charitable giving is not just the role of the “super-wealthy,” he adds.

Indeed, George T. Orfanakos, a charity fund raiser who has been involved with an episode of Extreme Makeover, says the show spurs acts of generosity.

Last year, Mr. Orfanakos organized a letter-writing campaign that persuaded the program’s producers to help a New Jersey family whose house had burned down. The two-story house, in an impoverished neighborhood in Irvington, was home to several children with physical and emotional disabilities.

A construction company volunteered its services for the rebuilding, which Mr. Orfanakos says cost close to $1-million, and bought the family a van. Such good will represents the spirit that Extreme Makeover can engender, says Mr. Orfanakos, who is vice president of development for the Children’s Tumor Foundation, in New York.

“It brings the best out in people. And for television to do that, thank God, because it’s not doing that all the time,” he says.

Paige Hemmis, one of Extreme Makeover‘s hosts, says the New Jersey episode was not a fluke.

Many fans write her letters or talk to her at public appearances about what good deeds the show has prompted them to perform, she says.

“Young kids come up and say, ‘I mowed my neighbor’s grass because he’s old,’” she says, laughing at the sweet, but blunt, way children can trumpet their efforts. Ms. Hemmis says she, too, has been motivated by the families she has met during the show’s four seasons and is donating a portion of the proceeds from her new home-repair book to Habitat for Humanity.

Lawsuit Over Show

Yet for all the contributions and volunteers the show may generate, charity as entertainment is a questionable endeavor, say several scholars and nonprofit leaders.

“In the 19th century you used to be able to buy tickets to go to poor houses and watch poor people eat sumptuous Christmas dinners that you helped pay for,” says Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television, at Syracuse University. “The same brain cells are being stimulated in enjoyment as when you watch Extreme Makeover and watch a poor family have its house built.”

Mr. Thompson does say that today’s shows are less offensive than the Dickens-era poverty tourism, in part because they provide desperate people with more than just one meal.

Some social-service leaders refuse to give the shows any slack.

The programs offer “a modest kind of [philanthropy] done for entertainment purposes,” says Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, in Washington. “They’re all exploitative.”

At least one family that has appeared on one of the charity shows agrees. The Higgins family of Southern California — five children who were left orphaned after the death of their parents — in 2005 sued Extreme Makeover: Home Edition‘s producers, charging that they failed to provide them with a new house as promised.

The show did fix up a house for a couple who promised to look after the siblings, who range in age from 15 to 22. But the Higginses allege the caretakers forced them to move out of the home not long after it was refurbished. The couple is also named in the lawsuit.

“Our position is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this whole process,” says Patrick A. Mesisca Jr., the lawyer for the Higgins family. He said the children feel exploited by the show.

Extreme Makeover’s production company, Endemol USA, in Los Angeles, says it does not comment on lawsuits. In a previous statement to reporters, the couple who housed the Higgins family for a time said the lawsuit was “bogus.”

The trial is expected to start in March in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, says Mr. Mesisca.

While not talking specifically about the lawsuit, Ms. Hemmis, of Extreme Makeover, says her show is sensitive to the problem of making caricatures of its beneficiaries.

“If someone says, ‘I really don’t want anyone knowing this,’ or ‘This part is really embarrassing, can we leave this quiet?’ we always respect that,” she says. “Our producers work with the families to make sure they don’t feel exploited.”

Moreover, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition receives more than 1,000 applications a day from families who want to appear on it, a sign that many people believe it treats participants fairly, she says.

‘Helping the Helpers’

In part because of the concern about exploitation, though, at least one charity TV program, Nascar Angels, has shifted its focus away from helping people in economic crisis to helping charity officials, teachers, and other local leaders, while also teaching general automotive skills to viewers.

In the show, the racing legend Rusty Wallace travels the country to fix beat-up vehicles owned by good Samaritans. The pilot episode, which never aired, featured a victim of domestic violence, but “there was a concern about, is it going to be the poor-person-of-the-week show,” says Phil Alvidrez, the program’s producer. The show is now primarily focused on “helping the helpers,” he explains.

He says the show’s goal is to provide practical upgrades to vehicles. “It’s not so much Pimp My Ride, but to make them really serviceable and safe,” he says, referring to an MTV show that transforms jalopies into flashy roadsters.

For instance, on a recent episode of Nascar Angels, mechanics made several thousand dollars worth of repairs to a 1990 Volkswagen van for Mary Setterholm, the leader of L.A. Surf Bus, a charity in Hermosa Beach, Calif., that teaches inner-city youths about the ocean and how to surf.

In her old van, “I was lucky to go 20 miles per hour up any hill,” she says. Now with her new vehicle, which she has nicknamed “Miracle II,” the former women’s surfing champion can carry her equipment and doesn’t have to worry about the doors literally falling off.

Her appearance also has made her a minor celebrity. “I get stopped all the time. I had one guy definitely hit on me,” she says, laughing.

Inspiring Gifts

For other charities that appear on philanthropic TV programs, the national exposure can lead to more tangible benefits.

For example, Autism Speaks, a New York charity, raised more than $113,000 thanks to an appearance on The Apprentice in December 2005, says Alison T. Singer, the organization’s senior vice president.

The Apprentice, in which contestants compete for a job with Donald Trump, is not strictly about philanthropy, but Mr. Trump stresses that charitable giving is part of running a successful business and ends each season with fund-raising efforts.

In the show’s fourth season, Randal Pinkett, a contestant on the show, organized a celebrity softball game in Brooklyn for Autism Speaks.

The game was rained out, but Mr. Pinkett impressed Mr. Trump and others by making an impassioned plea for more scientific research and public advocacy efforts to help children afflicted with the disease.

“He got up at the event and he spoke from the heart as if he had been an autism advocate for his entire life,” says Ms. Singer. “He really was an autism rock star on The Apprentice.”

The group, which was co-founded two years ago by the chief executive officer of NBC Universal, garnered $61,000 during the event and once the episode aired, viewers donated additional funds through the charity’s Web site.

What’s more, Mr. Pinkett, who ultimately won the show, continues to be a national spokesman for the group.

While becoming a partner with a reality show paid off for Autism Speaks, one scholar raises concerns that the programs indirectly convey a message to the American public that may hurt charities in the long run.

Eric Bain-Selbo, associate professor of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College, in Annville, Pa., worries that the newly popular Hollywood “noblesse oblige” can overshadow what he sees as the government’s responsibility to aid its citizens.

In the case of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, “you build a brand-new home for families, but you completely miss the larger social questions that underlie why this family needs this show to come in for them,” he says.

While he acknowledges that the television industry’s goal is to entertain, not to solve the nation’s problems, he would like to know more about the people who are assisted on the show.

“Is there a lack of high-paying manufacturing jobs in the region, so the father’s out of work?” he asks. “Is there unequal access to higher education so that members of the family have never been able to get the training or the education to get higher-paying jobs? Is there an inadequate health-care system and that’s why the family’s in crisis because they cannot maintain the upkeep on the home because they have a kid who is sick?”

Beyond Social Services

Perhaps with these concerns in mind, several nonprofit groups are using the popularity of charity television to confront broader social ills.

The American Civil Liberties Union, in New York, and the Sierra Club, in San Francisco, in the last two years have created 30-minute shows that feature everyday people fighting for the causes those groups promote.

The documentary-style programs lack the game-show feel of, say, Extreme Makeover, and have a smaller potential number of viewers than the commercial programs, but both organizations consider them a valuable way to educate Americans about their social concerns.

For example, the ACLU says its video preview of the show on its Web site is watched on average by 22,000 Internet viewers a month.

Along with these two national groups, at least one local charity also has become a part-time television producer.

The D.C. Central Kitchen is creating a reality show that will feature the ex-convicts, former drug addicts, and other hardscrabble people it trains to be cooks.

Robert Egger, president of the Washington charity, says the program could educate viewers about the plight of the poor and the benefits of healthy eating, while also providing a little drama as the students navigate their new responsibilities.

“Part of the show would really give us the ability for someone to say, My name’s Reginald. I’ve been in prison for 20 years, I’m really trying to get myself together now, and I’m learning a skill. Today I’m going to help you learn how to cook with fennel,” he says.

The show just started to air on a Washington cable channel, but Mr. Egger hopes to find a national outlet for it or a similar TV program.

So far, though, television executives haven’t fully grasped the concept, Mr. Egger says.

In response to his idea, they often say, “We love it, man, we can’t wait to do it — but we just can’t figure out who gets voted out of the kitchen.”

The reaction perhaps is a larger sign of the challenge any television program faces when mixing charity and entertainment.

“How do you find the nice middle ground?” Mr. Egger asks. “This is the conundrum.”