From cradle to the stage

There are enough implicit lessons in parenthood to be found in the curious, new up-with-nepotism reality series Rock the Cradle that family therapists all over Laurel Canyon may suddenly find themselves with little reason to remain in practice.

Rock the Cradle is a singing contest for the children of musicians both brilliant and ridiculous, leading to a prize of a record contract and girded by the assumptions that connections aren’t enough. When the show made its debut last Thursday on MTV, America learned what it meant to be the daughter of Eddie Money, and it is no enviable position, observes Gina Bellafante.

Growing up, Jesse Money felt so sought after because of her father’s celebrity that, as she puts it, “I just stopped making friends.” Hierarchy of fame is a fiction really. Whether you’re Liza Minnelli or the daughter of the man who gave us “Two Tickets to Paradise,” people will still step-dance all over the tombs of their ancestors to get a piece of you.

Rock the Cradle isn’t merely a battle of talents, it is a competition about who has lived in the most privileged misery, confirming what we want to believe: that the glamorous upbringing is a ruinous kind. As Olivia Newton-John’s daughter, Chloe Lattanzi, succinctly explains, “I spent a lot of time alone in big houses.”

Apparently Jesse Blaze Snider, a son of Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, spent a lot of time without cash. “He went to work on a bicycle,” Jesse says of his father’s financial troubles, the term “work” hanging there as if to imply that Dee Snider was working a cash register at Home Depot to settle his bills. Bobby Brown’s son Landon surely endured the worst of all though, watching other children dress up as his father in a prison suit on Halloween.

The Oedipal drama runs rampant on the show. After Landon received poor scores from the judges last week, Bobby Brown made no paternalistic, “my son is a genius” protests. “I accept what they say,” he offered. “I love him. It doesn’t matter what he does.”

Most competitive reality shows appeal to the perverse thrill of watching ordinary people fail. Rock the Cradle mediates our voyeurism, supplying another gross, mesmerizing layer: the smug faces of parents seemingly certain that their children will never surpass or outsell them. (The progeny, for their part, level passive-aggressive insults. “Danger Zone” never embarrassed him, Kenny Loggins’s son Crosby said, unprompted, last week. “It put lunch on the table.”)

The producers of the show are not so cruel as to present only a stage full of Frank Sinatra Jrs., but so far only Lucy, the daughter of the Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh, has proved a formidable talent. Still the judges display a generosity of spirit that would have the Simon Cowells of the world suing to get them out of the reality-show judges’ union. Only Larry Rudolph, a lawyer and manager complicit in the creation of Britney Spears, ever issues a harsh word, and when he does, he generally counters with something constructive.

Mr. Money turns out to be the most demanding presence on the show. “I’m a stage father, I just can’t help myself,” he explains. (What he doesn’t say is how he came to look vaguely like an old woman.)

One of the great mysteries of the world remains why children of successful singers — or actors, directors or microbiologists — don’t simply say to themselves, “You know, I think I’ll take up plumbing.” When, during a rehearsal, Mr. Money reprimands his daughter that she “blew the bridge” in her rendition of “When I’m Gone,” you hope she’s thought about graduate school.

Rock the Cradle is on MTV Thursday night at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.