The Twilight Zone (TV Series) How Much Do You Love Your Kid? (2003) User Reviews

Reality TV gone Berserk

[kapelusznik18 · 5/10 · 14 September 2016]

***SPOILERS*** With her out of work husband Ted, Steve Bacic, leaving for a job interview Donna Saicheck, takes her son Wylie, Nico McEowen, to the bus stop on his way to school only to later find out he never made it there! It turns out that Wylie had been kidnapped and is being held for ransom with the local police helpless to do anything to save him!

It soon becomes apparent that Donna and Wylie are being used in a local reality show "How much do you love you kid" and Donna is given by the shows host Nick Dark, Wayne Knight,just 60 minutes, with a number of clues, to locate him and win $500,0000.00 for her efforts or else he'll be murdered by his abductors! Desperate to find little Wylie Donna almost out of breath in looking for him finally finds Wylie barley clinging to life with his masked kidnapper running from the scene. Told by host Dark that she's get another $1,000.000.00 if she catches Wylie's kidnapper Donna with gun in hand, given to her by the show's host, takes off after him and he gets trapped like a cornered rat as she blasts him to kingdom come!

***SPOILERS**** The big surprise in all this is that Wylie's kidnapper just happened to be his dad Ted Saicheck who's new job was working for the reality show "How much do you love your kid" who needed the money so much that he put his son's life in jeopardy! Donna got her reward of 1.5 million dollars for the suffering that she was put through and Ted ended up getting his, in hot lead, for agreeing to put both his wife and son through all this not caring if they either lived or died just to get rich off it!

She Could Have Divorced Him and Kept the Money

[Hitchcoc · 7/10 · 11 July 2017]

Once you get over how preposterous the whole thing is, it's sort of entertaining. A family that is barely getting by is hoping the husband will land a new job. While he is away at a job interview, their son is abducted. Soon a TV crew comes to the mother and tells her that if she can find the son (they kidnapped him), she will win half a million dollars. She has to do it in one hour from clues they give her. The police refuse to help her because they are in on it and the TV execs have gained the proper permits. In the process the boy is injured and she is offered a full million if she can catch the killer. Well, there's quite a surprise at the end, to say the least. It's a parody of how far the reality show thing could go.

The police can't help??? Huh?! Who thought up this idea for an episode?!

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 15 February 2022]

The concept for "How Much Do You Love Your Kid?" is so utterly ridiculous I am shocked this episode of "The Twilight Zone" was created in the first place....and who would have approved this ludicrous script?!

When the story begins, a boy heads to the bus stop but is kidnapped. His mother learns he's disappeared and runs to the police station...only to be told they can't do anything about it because he's part of some weird reality game show "How Much Do You Love Your Kid?". So, we are expected to believe that local police are helpless or will do nothing because it's all part of TV...even when the slimey host (Wayne Knight) strongly implies that if she doesn't find her son in one hour, the boy will be killed. This is just stupid.

Whether what followed is good or not didn't really matter to me. The entire concept was so dopey and flawed that there is no way this could be a good episode of the rebooted "Twilight Zone". It also never made any sense that the desperate mother would go along with this...nor pretty much anyone.

To me, this episode just shows that the writers of the series had run out of ideas. I say this because of the dumb plot AND because late in the series they began making remakes of the original episodes from the 1959-64 series.

"This is an astonishing development!"

[classicsoncall · 3/10 · 24 March 2023]

This could very well be the most insane story I've ever seen. I know reality TV shows have nothing to do with reality, but this one flew in the face of any common sense. I think the writers for this episode probably threw darts and went with anything that stuck. The probability of something like this story actually happening in real life is so far removed from possibility that I don't think it could happen even in The Twilight Zone. At least Wayne Knight played his role as game show host Nick Dark with massive tongue in cheek and as over the top as he could. Same with Bonnie Somerville as the panicked mom trying to find her kidnapped son within the one hour time limit. As for her husband Ted (Steve Bacic), well, he probably could have used better judgment. I can't really say he got what he deserved in the end, but he certainly hadn't given the idea of making a quick buck much thought.