KEY POINTS:
Call me fainthearted, but I can't help getting nervous when tabloid-telly-maker Julie Christie starts delving into family matters for the benefit of our entertainment.
Lest we forget, Christie was the maker of the infamously misjudged You Be The Judge, which thought determining a child's paternity on air was a good idea.
Her latest effort, last night's Missing Pieces (TV3, 8pm), is a kind of reality private investigation show with this formula: Take one person desperate to find someone missing in their lives; dig up the absentee and a few skeletons along the way. Last night's first episode featured Ashlee, a charming young woman from Napier, orphaned early and desperate to find the half-brother she hasn't long known she had.
After the fuzzy, flickering Without A Trace-style opening credits, the Missing Pieces team were filmed hard at work making a few phone calls. Ashlee was taken to Melbourne to meet not just the one brother, but two. Plus their mother, abandoned by Ashlee's father when she was pregnant with her second son. So far so good for Ashlee, thrilled to at last have some family. Not so much for mother Noelene, although she put an amazingly brave and gracious face on having to relive a deeply painful past.
In the show's second story, to be continued next week, leukaemia sufferer Kelly is desperate to find her biological father and his offspring, because she needs a donor for a bone-marrow transplant.
Family circumstances are so often complicated, messy affairs and that's why they are the eternal fodder of soaps and fictional dramas. But delving into such real life situation feels horribly like meddling in someone else's business.
Missing Pieces masquerades as feel-good telly helping out the desperate, who perhaps don't have the time and resources to do the research or hire help. The team are filmed taking a softly-softly, respectful approach to their mission and the whole show is presented as making dreams come true.
But this isn't the same as a surprise garden makeover. The potential for collateral damage, as old wounds are reopened, is huge. When people cut themselves off from their families, it is highly likely there is pain, anger and guilt involved.
In one of the show's most uncomfortable scenes, the heroic Noelene and her sons watched home video footage of the husband and father who abandoned them, frolicking with his new family. We really shouldn't have been there.
Yes, we can say we watch out of genuine interest and sympathy, not for nosiness and voyeuristic reasons, all the while wondering why on earth anyone would want to expose their private family business on air. I'm sure everyone appears of their free will, although probably under a huge sense of obligation to help out the desperate and with the knowledge if they close the door on the cameras, that could become part of the story, too.
There are indeed some things missing when these kinds of stories, crucial to the people involved, are delivered up as prime time entertainment: scruples.
