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News Article: Japan Hit by Reality Show Scandal
TOKYO (Variety) - Reality bites -- just ask Japan's Fuji TV.
The network has found itself at the center of a scandal
after it was revealed that an episode of a top-rated show
featuring couples on the verge of divorce was staged.
The reality-based show, "Ai suru futari, Wakeru futari"
(Couples in love, couples breaking up), which grabbed audience
share of up to 27%, will be pulled from the air because of the
scandal, Fuji TV said.
In the show, a couple whose marriage is in trouble gets
advice from a celebrity panel. If the couple decides it cannot
work out its problems, the parties affix their signature seals
to a divorce petition and end their marriage right before the
final commercial break.
The couple's names are not used in the program and their
faces are not shown.
In a March 8 broadcast, the couple on the show was not
married. The so-called wife, a woman in her 30s, said she was
having an affair and wanted to leave her husband.
According to local media reports, the woman on the show was
actually having these problems and the man sitting next to her
was an actor. The woman later committed suicide when her real
husband learned that she appeared on the show, the reports said.
In the only official comment Fuji TV has made on the affair,
Masaki Miyauchi, head of its programming and production
department, admitted that the couple were not married and
apologized to viewers.
One of the celebrity panelists on the divorce show, a
cross-dressing, middle-aged singer named Kenichi Mikawa, was
involved in another Fuji TV show that touched off an
international incident. In 1998, he appeared on a gourmet travel
show that featured a dish made with endangered Bengal tiger.
Conservation groups blasted the network for its bad taste.
-- This is one of the saddest things I've ever read - Joe
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