Undercover Queen
The pandemic has us all watching a little more television than we used to. When I’m not catching up on missed episodes of Barnaby Jones and Cannon from the 1970s, I have made some time to check in with the always oblivious chief executives and always suffering employees of Undercover Boss. In that first February 2010 episode, in the throes of unprecedented economic turbulence, the head of Waste Management, Inc. went into the field to see what it was really like to work at the company. Ten seasons, more than one hundred episodes and a couple of Emmy Awards later, we have the answers—-it sucks to work at Waste Management and everywhere else. But if you’re lucky enough to be one of the employees asked to train the undercover executive taking a turn at the drive-through window or the assembly line, you get to tell him or her up close and personal of your student loan debt, disabled daughter, failing kidneys, drug-dependent father, two other jobs, and loyalty to the company. The upshot? You’ll probably get the student loan paid off, forty thousand dollars to boot, and an opportunity to share tears with someone whose annual income is likely a few hundred times greater than yours. So who am I to worry about the other thousands of employees not getting any help from the newly enlightened and benevolent head honchos?
Earlier today I was soaking up the 2013 rerun revelations of the CEO of Donatos Pizza of Columbus, Ohio when my wife strolled by. “I hate that show,” she told me with no hesitation. “They lift up four people an episode and everyone else gets to rot forever. Reminds me so much of Queen For A Day.”
Leave it to my wife to make that connection. Queen For A Day: The Cinderella Show ran on radio, then television, for twenty years. Featuring kindly, mustached star host Jack Bailey interviewing four women vying for the crown and the granting of their index card wish for a refrigerator, dehumidifier, electric blankets, upstairs heating, clothing for fifteen siblings, a bed for a paralyzed brother---almost always amidst desperation laid bare and the tears that go with it. (And once, a vacation, for a woman who had lost her two handicapped children and both of her parents recently.) One crown, one winner, one wish granted. Chosen by an applause meter tuned to the almost exclusively female audience at Hollywood’s Moulin Rouge Dinner Theatre charged with this awesome responsibility, all funded by Anacin, Colgate Dental Cream, Old Gold Cigarettes, Ex-Lax, Hartz Mountain Cat Yummies, and countless others over the years. It hasn’t made it to classic rerun status yet but some video excerpts are all over the internet, as painful to watch now as my wife remembered.
Desperate circumstances and the promise of a savior, be it undercover or by way of a temporary robe and crown, have always made good television ratings, if not necessarily good television or good policy.