Born Naughty

'Born Naughty' seemed just the kind of easy-watch television I was looking for. That was until I started watching. Either the edit selection was shoddy, or the director had no idea what they were looking for, as shots were all similarly awkward. The main coverage was as expected but wherever there was an edit to cover, only aided by voiceover, the shots showed awkward contributors leaving their houses and harsh sound quality differences in ill-fitting flashbacks.

dailymail,co.uk

The voiceover script was great at pointing out the obvious and at times, was a little assuming and cringeworthy. I'm not sure if it was the delivery or the script itself, but either way, lines such as, 'the family, who are now hungry for answers' after an intro about poor Bobby's life-affecting eating habits, just didn't work with the tone of the series. It was supposed to be an investigative medical format in which the aim was to help the families, not laugh at them. More than once were these quite serious issues put down to poor parenting and to mum being called lazy by grandma, and there really is no need to put that comment on every title sequence! The series so far has not captured the medical responsibility at all, nor the doctor/patient understanding. It's more of an 'us' and 'them' feel, gathering evidence in family homes and keeping their findings from them until the big reveal, pinning all their hopes on one moment. Professionalism and sensitivity, if there was any, were not reflected in the edit, jazzing it up with flashbacks and poor audio mixing, and I found it distracting.

radiotimes.com

In episode 2 it wasn't just poor edit selection either, we were being told one thing and shown another. We could pick holes in our 'experts' opinions because we had been present at times when those traits had not appeared on camera. Like when Jessi-Jai, a young girl with speech problems was miraculously saved by losing her dummy. On first visit, when Dr Ravi met her, she was sociable and imaginative, even sharing eye contact. On the second visit she instead did things her way, avoiding interaction. From minute to minute we as an audience were being pulled through a non-existent, inconsistent narrative of edited codswallop, that could potentially even be quite damaging to both contributors and viewers. Parents have the carrot of a cure dangled in front of them for the whole production, only to have their dreams realised, or destroyed right at the end. It's just not ok, I could barely watch. The children themselves were the redeeming ingredient in this horrible mix of opinions and experiments.

Completely insensitive, poorly scripted and inconsistent. Come on Maverick, you can do better than that.