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UPN: Amish Next Hot Thing
Bondage babes, horny bachelors and bug-crunching fame seekers need not apply for UPN's newest reality series.
Indeed, the network's tapped into a large pool of previously unjaded participants for its latest TV experiment, Amish in the City.
UPN announced today that the fish-out-of-water series, starring the horse-and-buggy set, would premiere in less than three weeks, with back-to-back episodes airing July 28.
The Real World-style series pairs five Amish youths with six of their big-city counterparts, including a party girl and a club promoter, in a swanky Hollywood Hills home and tracks the ensuing culture clash as the housemates take a helicopter ride to a resort island, work with the mentally disabled and walk the red carpet at a movie premiere.
Casting for the Amish youths was conducted mostly in the Midwest during the coming-of-age period known as rumspringa (Pennsylvania Dutch for "running around"), when the Amish are allowed to experience more "normal" teen activities, such as dating and driving, before deciding if they want to join the church.
But "running around" is a relative term for the simple-living Amish.
When the concept was first announced in January, it provoked an uproar from TV critics, advocacy groups and political types, with 51 members of Congress lending their John Hancocks to an anti-UPN petition.
But network execs denied any allegations of exploitation. "Foremost in our minds as we went forward was to treat with the highest respect the young Amish people who were entering a world they had never before experienced," said a statement from UPN prez Dawn Ostroff.
"In working with our producers, two of whom produced The Devil's Playground, a film that touched on many of these same issues, we believe we have succeeded in developing a program that is both serious and entertaining and ultimately very thought-provoking."
As such, the series had to be filmed in secrecy and wasn't touted on the network's upcoming schedule at its upfront presentation to advertisers in May.
The secrecy paid off for the network--CBS was forced to indefinitely postpone a similar series, the Real Beverly Hillbillies, after critics accused the Tiffany net of conducting a "hick hunt" through the Appalachians.
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