When You Wish Upon TV

By James Poniewozik

Amy Grant's new reality show is so sweet that you may need to brush and floss after watching it. In the pilot for Three Wishes, making its debut this fall on NBC, the Christian-pop singer and a crew visit a small California town to do three life-changing deeds. They arrange an operation for a girl whose skull was shattered in a car accident. They help a boy get adopted. And they build a new football field in honor of a high school coach with leukemia. Grant dispenses hugs by the bushel, sheds tears and pulls out her guitar, twice, to sing her single, Takes a Little Time: "It takes a little time sometimes/ To get your feet back on the ground."

In another verse, which she doesn't sing on camera, the lyrics continue: "You can't fix this pain with money." Don't be so sure. Alongside Three Wishes, several shows new and old are opening their wallets--and those of their corporate sponsors--to fix problems with dramatic windfalls and melodramatic tear jerking. The clear inspiration is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the surprise ABC hit in which carpenter Ty Pennington and a team of contractors rebuild houses for families with disabled kids, parents in Iraq or crushing debt (throwing in new cars and scholarships too) while organizing volunteer help from the neighbors. "People ask us how they can help," says executive producer Tom Forman. "It reminds us what good people we really are."

TV crews are lining up around the block to offer a good deed and a good cry. Heart-tugging giveaways have long been a staple of talk shows, but Oprah Winfrey upped the stakes last season with staggering bonanzas: new cars for an entire audience and gifts worth about $15,000 apiece for an audience of teachers. The Today show's "Live for Today" feature has sent a Salt Lake City, Utah, mom to sing on Broadway and an 81-year-old woman to the Kentucky Derby. Even Mark Burnett, producer of Survivor and The Apprentice, is developing a series in which Touched by an Angel's Roma Downey and Della Reese help people through problems.

Meanwhile, ABC, the chief beneficiary of make-a-wish TV, will rub that lamp several more times. On The Scholar (Mondays, 8 p.m. E.T.), 10 honor students vie for a college scholarship worth as much as $240,000. On this summer's inspirationally themed Brat Camp, troubled kids have their lives turned around by counseling. And for viewers who like to see heartstrings tugged literally as well as metaphorically, next season The Miracle Workers will give away medical care. A man gets treatment for severe tics so he can hold his baby again; a boy gets cochlear implants to hear his mother for the first time. Says executive producer Justin Falvey: "There are thousands of people suffering enormously and unnecessarily out there."

The networks call this phenomenon a reaction against mean reality shows and in favor of ones on which good things happen to nice people (see also American Idol). "We started off in a cynical place," says Three Wishes executive producer Andrew Glassman. "We explored what happens when animals attack and human beings are treated like lab rats in a social experiment. But people seeing wishes and dreams come true will always resonate." And ABC reality chief Andrea Wong points to network research that shows people are looking for programming to feel good about amid news of war and terrorism.

But these shows also target a timely anxiety: the middle class's fear of falling. The things these shows give away-health care, a house, college-have been among the foundations of social mobility. You might not be rich, but if you worked hard, you could secure them and give your kids a shot at doing even better. But all are becoming wildly expensive. The Scholar minces no words about these worries. College, says its narrator, is "the single best chance to grab a piece of the American Dream. But now the price of admission is threatening that dream." Even Fox's Nanny 911 and ABC's Supernanny offer a fantasy to time-strapped working parents: a child-care professional who swoops in and solves your family's problems.

In this moment of crisis, these series swing into place like a virtual social safety net. (All we're missing is a reality show on which 10 seniors compete to get their pensions restored.) And there are plenty of takers. In the Three Wishes pilot, the townspeople line up in droves to pitch their wishes to producers, like peasants petitioning a medieval lord. "The whole parking lot is filled with people humbling themselves asking for a hand," Grant says. "It's a beautiful thing."

In tough times, people often turn to a higher power-sometimes even higher than TV. It's hard not to see the effects here of the postelection focus on spiritual values. Grant doesn't talk about religion on Three Wishes, but Christian music is her claim to fame. There's a quasi-spiritual cast to Home Edition (and not just because an itinerant carpenter works miracles across the land). Participants talk openly about prayer, and the show often involves local churches. Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California, attributes this to a greater religious openness in American culture. Boyd draws a connection to TV's coverage of Pope John Paul II's death, which he says made it seem "as though everyone in America had converted overnight to Catholicism."

Regardless of the spiritual-or commercial-motivations, it's good to see TV using its resources for an act of charity other than giving Jenny McCarthy a sitcom. And you can't help tearing up when you see a little girl ask for an operation so she can do gymnastics again. While these shows do a social good, not just by helping but also by telling viewers they have the power to help others, they portray a particular kind of social contract as well. There is a great deal of talk of community in the small-town neighborhood sense and almost none in the national sense. They emphasize recipients' faith, their positivity, their unwillingness to blame others. Hardships are a result of fate, not cutbacks or social priorities. No one wonders why people in a rich nation forgo college or surgery. The solutions to problems are entirely private (in exchange for product placement) and local. It's federalist TV.

It's not that these shows are necessarily conservative by design. Talking with TIME about the inspiration for Three Wishes, Grant practically sounds like Barbara Boxer. "There is such a disconnect between the haves and have-nots," she says. "The wealthy are riding on the backs of the working poor." But it's the working people who bail one another out on Three Wishes; to pay off the injured girl's medical bills, for instance, the town holds a carnival. It is inspiring and heartbreaking. But it reminds us that there isn't a Ferris wheel big enough to help all the uninsured and undereducated.

Solving the middle-class squeeze is complicated, and it's not as if anyone expects a prime-time TV show to advance political solutions. But intentionally or not, these series make a quasi-political statement of their own. Buried under hospital or tuition bills? Take care of your own. Hold a bake sale. Live right; don't grumble; pray. Says one woman in a preview reel for The Miracle Workers: "Don't give up. You will find your miracle too." Until then, keep wishing, and keep watching. --Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles