‘Adults Adopting Adults’ is a crazy and scary reality show about adult adoption

Reality TV is full of wild relationship drama that encourages viewers to gawk at bizarre romantic arrangements, led by TLC 90 day fiance franchise, as well as the newest in the network You, me and my ex—and it is in this category that the latest novelties from A&E, Adult adopting adults, clearly falls. A series whose title says it all, it’s a wacky portrait of men and women who, for various reasons, have decided that having surrogate parental figures in their lives isn’t enough; they have to legalize these links, to hell with the consequences. And there are certainly consequences, since the whole point of such a television enterprise is to stage a figurative car crash that viewers can smother from the comfort of their sofa.

Premiere on January 31 Adult adopting adults focuses on a collection of tales, each as absurdly bonkers as the last. The first are Danny and Christy, a childless couple in Chillicothe, Ohio, who decided to adopt Illeana, 20, a young foreigner from Austria who was pregnant with her first child and whom Danny met on a social media group for adult adoption. . . Or rather, Danny has decided that, and Christy accepts it because she apparently has no say in their marriage and doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to her husband. This isn’t the first time Danny has wanted to adopt a grown woman; as he candidly admits, he tried with an 18-year-old, but that process fell apart because he started having romantic feelings for her. He also cheated on his wife before, which remains a sore point for Christy. All in all, the situation looks as bad as one might imagine.

Danny’s unfortunate motives for bringing Illeana into the house are obvious, and yet with a big smile he regularly professes his enthusiasm for being a father and performatively calls Illeana his daughter while Christy watches in misery. abject. Christy is in tears for about a third of her total screen time in both Adult adopting adults episodes provided to the press, and even when she’s not crying, she seems as excited about the turn of events as someone heading for major root canal surgery. According to Christy, her friends’ main reactions to this impending doom are “What’s wrong with your husband?” and “We’re gonna kill him,” which at least proves that Christy has some balanced people she can turn to. Danny, however, treats Christy’s objections as bumps in the road, as he puts Illeana in a trailer right outside her front door, buys her tons of baby clothes and pays for her medical appointments, and says things like, “At the end of the day, Illeana, I want you to stay here, because I love hugging you and you’re so sweet.

Suspicions are rife in Adult adopting adults‘ First portrait: Christy thinks Danny is after sex, and fears Illeana is just using him for money and a visa; and Illeana worries that Danny is a creep and has thrown herself into a messy marriage, not to mention potentially putting herself in danger, given that Danny (a truck driver who ran a survival business) has cameras. guard monitoring his dilapidated rural property. The series looks at this – and asks viewers to do the same – with a kind of rapturous disbelief, reveling in the dysfunctional weirdness and grossness of it all, as well as the potential for eventual conflict, which seems inevitable. given Christy’s disgust at being forced to tolerate Illeana (an obvious threat to replace her) in front of film crews determined to broadcast her despair to the world.

Danny, Christy and Illeana are just the first of many stories told by Adult adopting adults. In Las Vegas, Kim, 39, a mother of two, wants to be adopted by Vickie and Joe so her children can have loving grandparents. At the same time, however, Kim is successfully working to reconcile with her longtime adoptive mother, Valerie, who is unaware that she is about to be legally and emotionally replaced by Vickie – who, in turn , fears that Valerie’s reappearance after all these years could jeopardize her chance to cement her role as a grandparent. It all comes to a head at a birthday party for Kim’s eldest daughter, and watching in amazement, Kim’s husband Joe can only sigh, “This is all so weird.”

Then there are Derek and Carol, a black couple considering adopting 23-year-old Bianca, whom Carol met while working at SUNY Broome Community College. Carol has had previous experience with this process; during her first marriage, she tried to adopt a college student, only for her husband to enter into an affair with this young woman. Carol expresses no concern that this scenario could repeat itself, although she admits that Bianca acts like a “daddy’s girl” around Derek, suggesting that perhaps she should be on high alert. Derek’s brother Corey certainly is, telling Derek on a video call that their mother isn’t happy with what’s going on. That Bianca comes from a background troubled by drug addiction and has an alter ego named Gina, does not concern Derek, who is mostly upset that his mother is being disrespectful by not trusting him to make wise decisions for himself and his family. family.

Adult adopting adults rests on the fact that all of his subjects are doing something useless, senseless and doomed to failure. Other budding people will be featured in later episodes, including sisters Felicia and Tawney, who are on their third attempt to convince longtime nannies Jenny and Michael to become their legal parents, and Frederic von Anhalt, a former prince – and the ninth husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor and declared lover of Anna Nicole Smith, who seems keen on adopting a son (who would be her tenth adopted adult!) so he can have a “royal” heir. Will this all work? It seems unlikely! The bigger question, however, is whether there remains a continued appetite for this brand of reality TV madness that was doomed from the start.