Do your parents drive you crazy with their rules? It's always hard to readjust to the be-back-by-midnight-dear curfew, after months of living on your own and obeying nothing more than your every whim. Well, imagine your parents not only laying down the law about your curfew, but about whom you break that curfew with too. This is the concept of Meet My Folks, a strange blend of dating game show and reality television recently added to NBC's roster.
Meet My Folks is an obvious spin-off from the infamous lie detector scene in the movie, Meet the Parents starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller. When undercover FBI agent and overprotective dad De Niro catches the hapless Stiller snooping around in his secret office, he straps him up to the polygraph and grills him about his intentions for his daughter. Not only does the show's format center around a polygraph test given to all three contestants, the show's title is no creative leap either. It's so obvious that you can almost see the light bulb that must have gone off in the producer's head and the dollar signs that must have ka-chinged in his eyes when he watched that lie detector scene: "Eureka! Instant Dating Show Gimmick!"
The concept may be cribbed, but the format of the game is nontraditional to say the least. Two parents and their child play the role of host and invite three contestants into their home for a series of "dates" with the child and bonding activities with the mom and dad, including 6 a.m. fishing trips to weed out the less dedicated male suitors.
The show's allure is built on the premise that people aren't always who they seem, especially people on dating shows. Character witnesses and polygraph tests are enlisted to get to the bottom of this mystery, and just looking at the application to be a contestant reveals a lot about the dirt-digging aspect of the show.
For example, the application to be a bachelor competing for a daughter includes questions such as, "What sexual fantasy have you attained?" "List any bad habits you have" and "What is the worst thing you've done to get out of a relationship?" This is stuff you would never come up front and tell a girl you were trying to woo, let alone tell her parents.
Conversely, the application to be a father on the show asks questions with less personal and more predictable answers: "Has your daughter had premarital sex? How do you feel about it?" "How conservative do you rate yourself?" and "Do you have a Jacuzzi?" Throughout the show, people from each contestant's past, anyone from ex-girlfriends to siblings and roommates, give taped testimony casting doubt upon the contestants' good, clean-cut intentions and images. On the episode that I had the privilege of watching, an ex-girlfriend of one of the contestants cast doubt upon his sexuality.
Knowing this, male contestants flirt with the mother instead of the daughter, and try to assert a manly yet nice-guy image toward the father. Female contestants flirt shamelessly with fathers and try to convince the mother that they are Suzy Sweetheart girls-next-door who would rather spend a quiet evening baking cookies for her son than go out for a wild night of clubbing. In the episode I saw, only one of the guys made a move on the daughter ? and he wasn't the one who won the game.
The only problem with this romance-the-parents strategy is that it seems like it would be a hollow victory to have to spend a weekend stuck in Hawaii with someone who didn't even like you and had to hang out with youbecause their parents made them. Not exactly the stuff fairy tale dating shows are made of. Strangely enough, once the parents hand down their final decision, the cameras stop rolling and we never get to follow the match-made-in-her-parents'-den couple to their Hawaiian retreat.
All in all, Meet My Folks is a good show as far as mindless drivel goes. You find yourself very involved in the strategy of it all and amused/horrified by the lie detector test results. I just don't recommend watching it with your parents. They might get ideas.
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