Oh no! Another reason to never get off the couch.
On Thursday night, a new and absolutely riveting show, “The Will: Family Secrets Revealed,” takes us inside the nasty, mean, spiteful, vicious, brutal world of life after death. In other words, hell.
No, not the place with pitchforks, Satan and fire — the place with attorneys, guardians and money-hungry relatives in the world of last wills and testaments.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that a whole slate of shows won’t hit the air until July, so tomorrow night’s show is just a pilot. But what a pilot!
First up: the battle over the estate left by 73-year-old Kitty Tipton-Oakes, widow of a famous jazz musician.
In 2006, Kitty, who suffered from dementia, died without a will, leaving an estate worth 300 Gs, which was to be sorted out among three missing adopted sons (two of whom hadn’t spoken to her in 25 years), after paying fees to a guardian and a lawyer who happened to also represent a paranoid schizophrenic patient who may have been Kitty’s only actual birth child who no one knew about.
But years earlier, when Kitty’s estranged husband, 1960s chart-topping jazz musician Billy Tipton died in the arms of his son, Billy Jr., two big national stories emerged.
One was that Kitty had created such a house of horrors that the boys had run away and lived on the streets, until Billy Sr. moved out and moved into a trailer park to raise them alone. But why did he leave Kitty the house, while they lived cramped in a trailer?
It wasn’t until Billy died that his sons discovered that dad Billy wasn’t really Billy. If you don’t know, don’t ask.
That was only the first shocker. Turns out Kitty and Billy had never legally adopted any of the kids, weren’t legally married and every paper in their lives had been fake. As fake as Billy.
That meant that the long-suffering sons were not entitled to the inheritance and that the money would go instead to the state and that the mentally disturbed woman in the loony bin whose birth certificate listed Kitty as her birth mother would automatically have gotten the dough — if that birth certificate was real.
The real-life family finally appears on camera, as do the lawyers, guardian and everyone else who was after the dough, er, I mean, the truth.
As evidenced by the media feeding frenzy over the estate of Brooke Astor, it’s just shocking that it took this long for a network to come up with an idea this juicy. I may stay on the couch until July.