Billionaire seeks American dream
Nobody watches television for the realism. Particularly when it comes to work, class and status. Sometimes it takes a rich person to show viewers how hard life can be when you have no money.
In “Undercover Billionaire” (10 p.m., Discovery, TV-PG), self-made financial tycoon Glenn Stearns hopes to prove that the American dream endures. He volunteers to get dropped into a strange city with only $100 in his pocket. His goal is to create a million-dollar business in just 90 days. If he fails, he promises to cough up $1 million from his own pocket.
The first eight minutes of “Undercover” are little more than an advertisement for Stearns’ lifestyle. There are numerous shots of him in a helicopter, literally on top of the world.
Things get interesting only after he is deposited in Erie, Pennsylvania, a Rust Belt city with a proud industrial history. At first, he hopes to find discarded truck tires to sell and parlay them into cash. After some serious industrial dumpster diving, he comes up empty. He tries his hand at commission sales and can’t close a single deal.
All the time, a little ticker shows the audience how far he’s dipped into his $100 kitty, or how close he’s come to his million-dollar goal. Spoiler alert: The numbers get kind of scary in the pilot episode as he tires of sleeping in a truck in frigid conditions and is reduced to a ramen-only diet.
Stearns deserves credit for admitting that he may have been overconfident. “Billionaire” also respects its audience’s intelligence enough to show how Stearns explains the presence of a camera crew as he scrounges for jobs, money and meals.
The notion that viewers will only watch poverty when it is experienced by a secret rich person is hardly new to this show, or even television. Two of the best movies of the Depression era, “My Man Godfrey” and “Sullivan’s Travels,” operated on the same premise. They were both comedies. It remains to be seen in what genre “Billionaire” belongs as it continues its reality
television take on Horatio Alger’s message.
› The “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-MA, check local listings) presentation “Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation” recalls a mass gathering at an “Aquarian” music festival that marked the end of the 1960s.
Filled with rare footage, “Woodstock” focuses on the business side of a festival run by people who had no business running a major event. It shows how a positive “vibe” kept major catastrophes at bay and how rural Bethel, New York, residents shed their suspicions to offer medical aid and food to a hippie throng nearly half a million strong.
While this is an “American Experience,” there’s little historical perspective offered. We never hear how the spirit of the festival has survived or withered over the past five decades. Rich in performance footage and observations by those who were there, it’s a celebration of a celebration that has already inspired many retrospectives.