Jaw's Law
There wouldn't have been a Suicide Show without the "endineers," as I liked to call them. You knew them as Gus, Leo and Dex, but their real names are much longer. I made these guys part oif the show because they were part of the show. Without them, we had no show. No devise, no demise.
The endineers designed and built 110 suicide contraptions over our three-year run, and almost none of them worked at first, and many of them didn't work at dress rehearsal either--but this only raised the tension level.
People accused of us of rigging them to fail on purpose to improve our ratings. There are two reasons why this is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Number one, we had no reason to improve our ratings. We owned 7 to 9 o'clock, three nights a week. Yet income from advertising was less than 8% of our total. Endowments accounted for more than 40% and syndication brought 21% with the rest divided among merchandising, spinoffs and endorsements. And these figures don't even include the Heaven's Jaws, our controversial but highly successful venture into franchised hospice care.
The second reason we never rigged an apparatus to fail was because the Suicide Show was not about failure but success, not about despair but about hope, never about grief but about joy. It was about pain, but only if the contestant chose it. The experience of dying a horrible death before the eyes of the entire world, with your family and friends in the front row, is painful enough. We had no reason to make it worse. And besides. We had Jaw's Law.
Jaw's Law was not, as some suspected, a simple variation of Murphy's Law, which says that if anything can go wrong, it will. There really never was a "Jaw's Law," not for public consumption, at least. The first time I heard the term was when Senator Browning asked me about it at the Hearings. I said: "Jaw's Law states that if anything can go wrong, we've got a way out of it." It didn't go over so well at the Senate, but it was best sound bite of my career.
Early on, when the concept was just in the napkin stage, I made a special point about the importance of addressing humanitarian concerns. I didn't want to mess with anybody's dignity. We had promises to keep. These people gave us their lives. You can't give any more than that. We had an obligation to deliver everything we promised--every dime of the donations to which the family was entitled in a timely way with advisor services for investing it wisely, and Uncle Sam got more than his fair share, believe me, which was how the show got on the air in the first place, and how the U.S. government was able to reverse its position on euthanasia.
If I had a law, it was this: Jack Jaw's Suicide Show would never put these people out there to humiliate them, embarrass them, make fun of them or torture them unless they opted. That's why we had doctors on the actual set. They were there to ensure that no contestant would die before their designated time. I had two hours to fill three nights a week. And every week we moved to a new stadium in another city! The advance work was deep deep, way deep--18 months out! And still we were always behind schedule. Within the first week we knew we'd never be able to kill them all. It was one of those happy/sad revelations that haunt you sometimes. And it haunts me most, these days, that my work, for now, is done.
A small article in the newspaper last week gave me an incredible lift. Whoever filled the soup did a lousy job but I could still make out most of it. It said the suicide rate, though flat, remains strong and steady, some 600% higher than it was in the 20th century. So there is progress. We must press on. Why? Because life goes on, and death proves it.
That's why.
The endineers designed and built 110 suicide contraptions over our three-year run, and almost none of them worked at first, and many of them didn't work at dress rehearsal either--but this only raised the tension level.
People accused of us of rigging them to fail on purpose to improve our ratings. There are two reasons why this is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Number one, we had no reason to improve our ratings. We owned 7 to 9 o'clock, three nights a week. Yet income from advertising was less than 8% of our total. Endowments accounted for more than 40% and syndication brought 21% with the rest divided among merchandising, spinoffs and endorsements. And these figures don't even include the Heaven's Jaws, our controversial but highly successful venture into franchised hospice care.
The second reason we never rigged an apparatus to fail was because the Suicide Show was not about failure but success, not about despair but about hope, never about grief but about joy. It was about pain, but only if the contestant chose it. The experience of dying a horrible death before the eyes of the entire world, with your family and friends in the front row, is painful enough. We had no reason to make it worse. And besides. We had Jaw's Law.
Jaw's Law was not, as some suspected, a simple variation of Murphy's Law, which says that if anything can go wrong, it will. There really never was a "Jaw's Law," not for public consumption, at least. The first time I heard the term was when Senator Browning asked me about it at the Hearings. I said: "Jaw's Law states that if anything can go wrong, we've got a way out of it." It didn't go over so well at the Senate, but it was best sound bite of my career.
Early on, when the concept was just in the napkin stage, I made a special point about the importance of addressing humanitarian concerns. I didn't want to mess with anybody's dignity. We had promises to keep. These people gave us their lives. You can't give any more than that. We had an obligation to deliver everything we promised--every dime of the donations to which the family was entitled in a timely way with advisor services for investing it wisely, and Uncle Sam got more than his fair share, believe me, which was how the show got on the air in the first place, and how the U.S. government was able to reverse its position on euthanasia.
If I had a law, it was this: Jack Jaw's Suicide Show would never put these people out there to humiliate them, embarrass them, make fun of them or torture them unless they opted. That's why we had doctors on the actual set. They were there to ensure that no contestant would die before their designated time. I had two hours to fill three nights a week. And every week we moved to a new stadium in another city! The advance work was deep deep, way deep--18 months out! And still we were always behind schedule. Within the first week we knew we'd never be able to kill them all. It was one of those happy/sad revelations that haunt you sometimes. And it haunts me most, these days, that my work, for now, is done.
A small article in the newspaper last week gave me an incredible lift. Whoever filled the soup did a lousy job but I could still make out most of it. It said the suicide rate, though flat, remains strong and steady, some 600% higher than it was in the 20th century. So there is progress. We must press on. Why? Because life goes on, and death proves it.
That's why.
by CW Fisher at 10:06 PM
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