Live for the Moment

The show is by turns sweet and funny.

Even offering a slightest knock of this show feels about as kind as, say, throwing a rock at a Haitian orphan. This viewer, however, is not convinced there’s a one-hour series here.

Probst's heart certainly appears to be in the right place. Still, in terms of surviving in the rough-and-tumble of reality TV, he ought to be the last guy who needs being told it's a jungle out there.

The cues for tenderness and uplift are all over Live for the Moment: the choked-back tears, the crowds of applauding family and friends, the corny speeches, the constant reiterations (essential for this sort of reality show) of how amazing the whole experience has been.

The show is a manipulative tearjerker that uses this poor guy's real-life death sentence to milk tears out of viewers. And that makes it a little icky to watch. It's great that Childs gets all sorts of adventures but the blatant effort to wring tears out of viewers made me uncomfortable.

This show still feels emotionally manipulative and at times even uncomfortably invasive.

With what I'm sure are only the best of intentions (pshaw!), Live for the Moment winds up being one of the skeeviest and most exploitative things on television since...well, not that long, because television finds so many ways to skeeve and exploit in the name of "reality."