Would you be willing to wager your life away? One young woman, Nuriko Furuta, did just that. The complexity of her actions, and the actions of those who encountered her, finally gets a network treatment this evening, not one of the big three, but a network just the same.
TZON, or the “T Zone” as the network has branded itself, has made its reputation on classic and obscure reruns combined with a parade of contemporary tabloid journalism and the boom of reality TV’s popularity. In a classic case of the right time and the right place, the network jumped from a small independent station in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to a nationwide network with affiliates around the country in less than fifteen years, with this ratings-winning formula.
One of T Zone’s signature shows, Prime Hours, uses the structure of one part taped interview, one part reenactment, and one part live interview. Prime Hours has been accused of soliciting the desperate for their subjects. The live interview is always stacked against the interviewee, but Prime Hours representatives consistently assert that all interviewees have signed releases before going on the air. While it’s not quite the chair-throwing spectacles of other tabloid shows, a guest spot on Prime Hours is almost never a positive turn in the lives of those appearing in the hot seat. Usually, they agree for reasons of their own, believing their voices need to be heard, no matter the personal cost.
Tonight’s television highlight is a belated postscript to one of last year’s strangest news stories. In a year that will be remembered for the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, and the subsequent deluge of media coverage, the quiet tragedy of Ms. Furuta’s passing generally got lost in the shuffle. While her name may not ring any bells for you, if you were watching news coverage late last November (and really, who in this country wasn’t?), you probably remember the unusual circumstances of her death.
Ms. Furuta was the thirty-three-year-old Japanese woman who apparently took her life savings and set out alone from Nagasaki to Minneapolis and then into North Dakota, in search of the million-dollar ransom featured in the cult crime-drama/farce Fargo, then died of exposure, allegedly watching the Leonid meteor showers, mere yards from a group of cottages, outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
When she was first discovered the day before, Ms. Furuta was wandering around a landfill behind a truck stop outside Bismarck, carrying a crudely drawn map. Authorities were unable to find anyone who could speak Japanese, and given the young woman’s minimal grasp of the English language, they were also unable to convince her that the ransom did not exist. News coverage at the time claimed she was released because she had not been engaged in any illegal activities, and already overworked authorities chose not to hold her because “fuzzy thinking is not a crime in this country.” She then took a bus to Fargo and hired a taxi to take her on an hour-long ride out to Detroit Lakes, where she died, surrounded by cottages.
Media sources generally would have tended to eat this story up, for all of its inherently ironic nature, but last November, we were not very receptive to irony. Though a number of unsettling questions presented themselves at the time the story broke, this strange set of events received little airtime and then quietly disappeared, much like the young woman herself.
The live segment of tonight’s episode of Prime Hours (Channel 33, 10:00 EST) is dedicated exclusively to these events, where we get the first in-depth interview with Tommy Jack McMorsey. You have not likely ever heard his name before, either, even if you had paid attention to the story as it unfolded. Mr. McMorsey is the truck driver from Lubbock, Texas, who initially reported the woman to authorities in North Dakota and who was also, later, the last person to see the young woman alive.
Among the segments, Prime Hours will recap the original November news coverage of Ms. Furuta’s death, and the brief period in which Mr. McMorsey was considered a potential suspect in the case, before authorities ruled the young woman’s passing a “death by misadventure.” Following that, Peter Haskell interviews Mr. McMorsey, who makes the claim that the news reports from the time were inaccurate. Authorities who interacted with Ms. Furuta are also interviewed and asked to address the truck driver’s claims. The last segment includes further responses, from the news media sources local to the story, whose assertions Mr. McMorsey is refuting.
Is this story a stinging indictment of the way in which our news sources handle the smaller tragedies of our world, further dehumanizing us, or is it merely a continuation of exploitation disguised as probing news? Either way, it should make for interesting and engaging television. Be sure to tune in.
Annie Boans
Before Commencement, my regalia still cloaked in a garment bag for another year, I stopped by my office mailbox where a new interoffice mailer held the morning paper’s back section. An article was circled in red marker, a note attached to the upper corner with a paper clip. The rigid, formal, and stiff penmanship was my former mother-in-law’s. It was a note of very few words, each one counting, as if letters were being rationed and Martha Boans were down to her last few.
My world changed in that moment, within her oddly constipated script, as if I had donned glasses for the first time, or had been suddenly fitted for a hearing aid after years of reading lips and deciphering the intended meaning of dull consonants and vowels. The vague whispers I had heard perpetually throughout the reservation suddenly came into sharp, piercing distilled sounds, like swords drawn. For years, I had been so close to knowing the information held on this scrap of paper, and even as close as I’d come, my mother never flinched, answering my questions with the nonchalance of telling someone what was for dinner. I should have followed my usual rule.
Every year, I purposefully avoid my campus mailbox on this day. I don’t want to be tempted to bring work with me to Commencement, sneaking glances at letters, calls for proposals, invitations, as the kids walk across the stage. Instead, I daydream my way through Commencement. You can only hear so many “It’s a Big World Out There, but if You Are Determined, You Can Make a Difference” speeches and still be moved by them. I turn the volume down on the Potential Futures of Our Graduates speech, drowning it with future lectures, grocery shopping lists, favorite songs, harvested from memory.
I always try to appear attentive and smile at the graduates I had known. Any time I think of using a sick day for Commencement, I remember walking across the stage, seeing professors who had made a difference in my life. I have little faith that I’ve changed students’ lives, but this was the only chance for some. Entering, they had been one step away from fast-food franchise assistant manager and they still might take my next Value Meal order.
My own time in college was spent nearly leaving those halls for good, almost every day. The only thing keeping me there for the first year was my mother’s potential daily glower if I had stopped going. That I studied art merely attenuated her stares. She still scantly believes I talk about art every day and receive a two-week paycheck she wouldn’t have seen over the course of two to three months in any given year. My students’ faces share the same will to stare down doubting parents, and that kept me at Commencement while colleagues had already switched over to gin and sailboats and “good books.”
Though my grades were in a week before, I’ve continued inhabiting my office even beyond finals week. Some nights my apartment seemed emptier than others. Most evenings, I enjoyed coming home to clean silence. Up to a year ago, before my husband and I separated, every night would have been my ex-mother-in-law’s combination of Jeopardy and smoky haze. During finals week, in past years, Doug would make my favorite dishes, have a bath waiting, and a good film from the little rental place a half-hour drive away. It was the only place you could get decent films without computer-generated explosions or surgically altered couples falling predictably in love, awash in a Top 40 sound track.
This year, finals week was pizza or Chinese delivery “for one” and whatever was on cable. Once Commencement is over, I want to be anywhere with people, though I frankly have no idea where. My old socializing was with Doug and our families. My colleagues had gradually stopped inviting us to their parties a few years ago. As much as I’d wanted my own space, lately the apartment offered only sterile discomfort. Maybe T.J. Howkowski, sitting next to me on the stage, would want to do something, I had thought through the ceremony.
I had helped him get his foot