While I’d been chasing The Amazing Race Asia all weekend, on early Tuesday morning after a long night at work, I caught up with another race altogether on The Lifestyle Network: Oprah’s Big Give (also called as The Big Give), where, at the risk of elimination, contestants, both as teams and individuals, have to travel all over America and race the clock as they give away thousands and thousands of dollars in trying to help people in their own unique way. Trust Oprah Winfrey to have a go at reality television in this manner!
Hosted by Oprah’s favorite designer Nate Berkus, the show’s premise seems sincere from the onset. Ten people from all walks of life—there’s a beauty queen, a military man, a self-made millionaire, a paraplegic, a model and actor, a self-confessed “selfish” marketing executive, an Amtrak service attendant, a scientific researcher, a singer, and a CEO—sign up for the show without knowing that $1,000,000 in prize money (half the winner could keep, half to be given away) was at stake. They then travel to different states to do charitable acts, with money given to them at the beginning of the show. Sometimes the recipients of their charitable acts were chosen for them; sometimes they had to come up with it themselves. The bottom line was that they all had to give away as much money as they could within a designated time limit.
I caught the Florida leg of The Big Give, in which Joe and Gavin Maloof, dubbed as the “Billionaire Maloof Brothers” (most popularly known for being the owner of the Sacramento Kings, but, really, I did a quick check, and the family’s all over the place, with Las Vegas and Paris Hilton and Pierce Brosnan cropping up in some paragraphs on the broadly diversified Maloof empire), give the remaining seven contestants $100,000 each to give away within 24 hours. That was $700,000, all in all, at their disposal. There were rules, of course: they couldn’t give away cash, they couldn’t give one person more than $500 worth of items, and they couldn’t spend more than $10,000 at one place.
To say that I was blown away by the task is an understatement. Imagine having all that money at your disposal to make a difference in this already cynical world! However, it didn’t take long for my own cynicism to set in. The contestants would be judged for creativity, and not all of them had enough of it to really make a dent within 24 hours. Many of them headed for supermarkets and malls to give impromptu shopping sprees to people they deemed needy. Granted, the supermarkets and malls were in the poorer areas of Miami, but still, no proper screening was conducted. Many of them also looked for charities to sponsor. Some of the beneficiaries include a school, a center for disabled children, a center for young adults out of foster care, a foundation for sick children, and an animal shelter.
Surprisingly, only one person managed to give away all his money. Stephen, the CEO, did so by asking his father, who lived in the area, for assistance. After having already distributed $70,000 to various charities, he used the remaining $30,000 for a shopping spree. He bought all sorts of electronics and appliances and, with the help of his father, distributed them among households in poor areas. Again, no proper screening was conducted. He just turned up at the doorsteps of various families and gave away big screen televisions, microwaves, Gameboys, iPods, computers, and the like.
It was a great Santa Claus moment, and yet it left me, and apparently some well-meaning critics, with the feeling that the dent of this kind of charity just wasn’t significant enough. Then again, who am I to judge what to do with money that isn’t mine? What may seem like mere acts of squandering to me are already random acts of “paying it forward” for people who are wealthy enough to have $700,000 to give away in 24 hours. I mean, does the act of giving diminish when you give to someone who’s not starving or in a near-death scenario?
What I do know is that the season that’s currently being shown on The Lifestyle Network is the one and only season of The Big Give because Oprah decided not to push through with the show.
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