My first wish for “Three Wishes,” NBC’s new wish-fulfillment reality series, would be that it were a better show.
My second wish would be to figure out a way to criticize a show – which sets out to do good deeds – without feeling like such a curmudgeon.
After all, if I give “Three Wishes” a bad review, and NBC cancels it, does that mean it’s on my conscience? That down the road, a little girl won’t get an operation to fix her face and skull, or a leukemia patient won’t live to see her last wish realized?
I wish no one sees it that way, and that’s my third wish regarding “Three Wishes.”
The premise of the show, which premieres tonight at 9 EDT, has singer Amy Grant, and worker bees from “Trading Spaces” and other quick-improvement shows, taking to the road and descending on a different small town or city each week.
They set up a “wish tent” and invite the community to line up, come in and tell their stories – stories about why they, or someone they love, deserve to have a wish come true.
Amy and company listen, and decide, and go from there.
In TV terms, there’s an obvious debt to ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and even its parent program. One of tonight’s three wish recipients is a young grad-schooler named Abby who seeks facial and cranial reconstruction after a disfiguring car accident.
The producers of “Three Wishes” also work on a backyard structure for her to revitalize athletic interests.
But there are also elements of other TV shows. These include “Invasion: Iowa,” in which William Shatner listened to the dreams of small-town folk and helped some of them come true. It even calls to mind one of the great-granddaddys of reality TV, “Queen for a Day,” in which the housewife with the most pathetic story won a washing machine.
Another of Friday’s wishes, from a selfless and very ill high-school coach thinking only of her students, is to have a new, safe football field landscaped. It’s a fine wish – but the way the show takes its TV crew into the office of a local business owner, asking for donated labor and material with all the peer pressure a TV camera implies, seems a little unseemly.
Even more uncomfortable, another wish, from a small boy who wants to make his loving stepfather happy, comes off as little more than a product-placement commercial for a loaded Ford truck. Even if that’s not what it is, it has that feel. Like the overly sentimental and sappy music, it feels manipulative and almost cynical.
Yes, these are good deeds. Yes, Amy Grant seems genuinely nice. But no, “Three Wishes,” unlike “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” does not come off as a good TV show.
Good-hearted, no question. Good? Sorry, no.
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THREE WISHES
9 p.m. EDT Friday
NBC
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