There was a time, maybe a decade and a half ago, when the documentary series format primarily existed as a kind of freak show. You’d tune in and watch an hour of a couple that had an unmanageable number of children, or a shut-in with a fear of buttons, or a girl who only ate hair. In retrospect, the whole thing was creepy and exploitative, and the fact that shows like these don’t exist as much any more is a sign of humanity’s ability to improve.
Or at least it was, because now there’s a show called Adults Adopting Adults, and good Lord the bad old days are here again. Adults Adopting Adults is exactly what it sounds like. There are a bunch of grownups, seemingly happy with their life, who decided to adopt other grownups for a variety of reasons. And while a universe theoretically exists in which Adults Adopting Adults is a sober look at the rationale behind such a momentous decision, this is clearly not that universe.
Adult adoption appears to be one of those grey areas that varies in terms of legality wherever you go. It’s illegal in the UK, for instance, but American regulations vary from state to state. Some require the birth parents to be notified, others require the adoptee to have diminished capacity. Others just let anyone go hell for leather. Anyone.
Take Ohio residents Danny and Christy. They’ve made the decision to adopt a 20-year-old woman from Austria who they found on social media and have never actually met. Why? It’s hard to say, although it immediately becomes clear that one half of the marriage is much more into the idea than the other. That half is Danny, a man who had previously attempted to adopt a different woman, only for the process to go wrong because he developed romantic feelings for her. And now he’s doing it again. And also he has a history of cheating on his wife.
Christy, meanwhile, is much less willing to let a stranger into her house. She resents spending money on her adopted adult daughter. She buys a trailer for her to live in. Her friends tell her that they want to kill Danny. Gradually, and publicly, Christy starts to unspool. On the basis of the first two episodes alone, Christy looks to all the world like a woman who has accidentally stumbled into a horror movie. It’s genuinely very upsetting to watch.
And this is the problem. Perhaps the producers of Adults Adopting Adults fixed themselves with a sheen of compassion, convincing themselves that this would be a sensitive depiction of a little-understood process. But that very tangibly is not what it is. Large portions of Adults Adopting Adults are a middle-aged woman sobbing uncontrollably into an iPhone. If there’s a duty of care involved anywhere here at all, it disappears completely during Christy’s segments.
True, not all the adoptions on the show are as out and out troubling as Danny and Christy’s. We meet two grownup children who want to adopt their long-term foster carers, which seems more of a ratification of an existing relationship than anything more sinister. Later in the series we are promised an ageing German prince who wants to adopt an adult so he has someone to pass his inheritance to. And that’s obviously not conventional. That’s a nightmarish cross between Willy Wonka and Amour. But, hey, whatever, let the man have his fun.
Others, meanwhile, come close. One woman, under the despairing gaze of her long-suffering husband, decides that she wants to be adopted so that her children can have grandparents. The problem is, they already have grandparents, because her mother is still alive. They’re estranged, but not so estranged that the woman can’t drag an entire camera crew to her mother’s house to inform her that she has been replaced. The mother, for what it’s worth, responds in exactly the same way anyone else would.
There is also the woman who chooses to adopt a 23-year-old woman despite the fact that the last time she attempted anything like this, her ex-husband had sex with her new adult daughter. Of this newest daughter, the woman gazes at her second husband and coos, “She’s a daddy’s girl.” I cannot tell you what happened after that, because my entire house suddenly became full of red flags and my view of the television was obstructed.
You have to assume that most people who adopt adults do it simply for the paperwork, that they’re underlining a pre-existing relationship to spare legal difficulties in the event of their death. But Adults Adopting Adults is aggressively uninterested in this aspect of the process. It’s a show that willingly splashes around in the muddy waters of exploitation. As such, it isn’t something you’d want to watch a lot of. I certainly won’t, although I might skip ahead to the finale to make sure that Christy is OK.
