Balloon boy held our attention while his father held out hopes for a show
Hannah Webber, Staff Writer
Published On: 10/26/2009
Earlier this month, images of a giant UFO-like helium balloon floating across the skies plastered every news channel in America. Almost immediately, this balloon and the 6-year-old boy who was reportedly inside captivated the country. Everyone feared for the life of this poor kid who was presumably floating across the state of Colorado, though no one could detect a boy anywhere near the balloon.
News outlets stopped covering stories about the Middle East or President Obama, and our local news even took a breather from the continuing saga of Larry Langford to broadcast the footage of that floating balloon. Twitter and Facebook updates were flooded with concern about poor little Balloon Boy. Basically, everyone was freaking out.
It turns out that Balloon Boy, whose real name is Falcon Heene, wasn’t in the balloon at all. In fact, we should be calling him “Box-in-the-Attic Boy” because that’s where he was: hiding in a box in his attic.
To be more specific, we should call him “Box-in-the-Attic, Son-of-Attention-Hogs Boy,” because the whole thing was a hoax put on by Falcon’s parents in the hopes of marketing themselves for a reality show.
So this was just the preview of the great Heene takeover of American television. Watch out Kardashians.
Hold on, though. You have seen the Heene family on television before — and by “you,” I mean the “Wife Swap”-watching crowd. Yes, the Heenes were on “Wife Swap,” one of the most pointless, brainless shows on television. And now they are trying to start their own reality show? Why? What is so special about these Heenes — other than the fact that one of their children’s names is Falcon?
Let’s go down a checklist of what qualities America likes a family to have on their reality shows.
The Heene family doesn’t have an extraordinary number of children. They only have three children, and that’s no Gosselin or Duggar clan. Besides, when Falcon decides to go off to his attic box, there will only be two children to watch, and that’s just boring.
No one in the Heene family has any sort of obvious physical impairment — at least none we’ve seen so far in their news stories or on “Wife Swap” — so there really wouldn’t be much inspirational value in watching these people live their everyday lives.
The Heene family isn’t really that famous. Before the balloon hoax, no one (except maybe the very faithful “Wife Swap” fans) even knew who they were. Their fame probably wasn’t even half that of the least famous Kardashian. No one is interested in watching normal, non-famous people.
Maybe the Heenes aren’t “normal,” though. The Wikipedia article on the “Colorado balloon incident” states that Falcon’s father, Richard Heene, is a storm chaser and does crazy stuff like riding motorcycles into tornadoes and flying planes around the perimeters of hurricanes. He also believes humanity descended from aliens, and he takes his children on UFO hunting expeditions.
I will admit some of that would make for some good television. For giggles, I might like to watch Heene talk about aliens while he’s flying a helicopter into a volcano (that’s the obvious next stunt), but at best that’s a Discovery or Sci Fi Channel one-shot special presentation, not a whole series. We don’t need any more reality television.
Respectable dramas are cancelled because viewership goes down by a couple thousand people. Shows that don’t wow audiences within the first two episodes are axed without a second thought. Yet we still have to wade through the likes of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” “The Girls Next Door,” “Leave it to Lamas,” “(Jon and) Kate Plus 8,” “The Hills,” “The City,” and countless others to find the few gems of intelligent television-watching experiences.
It’s bad enough we have to deal with some of these people in our magazines (I’m talking about you, Kardashians). It’s bad enough that the Heenes have taken over our news outlets. We don’t need to give these type of people 30 minutes to an hour of television to pull pointless stunts. It wastes time and money that could be spent doing much better things.
Email: hwebber@uab.edu
