I wonder if Oprah has really thought this contest through. The one major difference between her new reality show, The Big Give, and every other reality show is there's no schaudenfreude, no gaffs, no embarrassment, no bad guys. Instead of seeing the one contestant you really don't like getting voted off, you have to watch yet another worthy cause blow away like so much dust in the wind.

If you, the viewer, does become engaged enough in the stories of the contestants, you will eventually experience the let-down of not having your pet charity get the O-Blessing. Or the personal disappointment that you apparently didn't or couldn't give or care enough.

If the audience is to be asked to give money to their favorite charity each week, it is conceivable that The Big Give will drain existing charitable giving from the institutions and programs that currently gather these funds. Alternately, does The Big Give become an institution that shuts out small mercies, blossoming new programs?

The biggest concern of all, of course, is that The Big Give could inadvertantly create a pecking order of goodness -- ending starvation trumps other forms of human suffering, human suffering trumps animal and environmental suffering, big foundations that help thousands of terminally ill patients trump helping one super-lucky kid get his all-too-short-lifelong wish, and so on, as givers are eliminated. What happens when it's a close call -- a cancer program versus a AIDS program?

You have a good point. I was all set to write a bitchy post about how Oprah is our country's Negress Mother of the Time, but I wasn't thinking about the darker implications of her new show.

But now I've got to stop and think. And really, this brings up some large ethics questions. Should the charity benefit many a little bit, or one a great deal. You could pay for one underprivileged child to go to medical school - or you could feed an African village for a year (assuming they received the money donated, and it wasn't usurped by some malevolent dictator).

I can't say as I'll ever watch this show. But it's nice to know that nothing, not even philanthropy, is save from Reality TV's soul sucking abyss.

Well, watching other people do charitable things on TV sure beats the heck out of having to do it yourself!

As entertainment I agree having no bad guys makes it rather boring in the long run. But as far as the charities competing, it's no different than Celebrity Jeopardy or any of those other game shows who let celebrities compete for their favorite charities. Everybody gets something out of it (at the very least a ton of free publicity which surely helps with donations) while somebody gets lucky with the big prize. And in an example like you suggest, is there any doubt both will end up winning? That'll be the big surprise at the end of the show, just like how Trump sometimes fires multiple people to shake things up.