Amid all its other wrong turns, MTV has done a good job from time to time presenting documentaries of young people telling good first person stories about their lives. The story of one teen, Breeanna, is so compelling, they’ve created a whole series about her.
“Generation Cyro” (MTV, 10 p.m.) tracks her youthful quest to find her sperm donor, first by meeting the array of half siblings she’s found she’s had all across the country, and then using DNA testing to find the guy. It’s like “Catfish” with consequence (and minus the annoying hosts of that show), where Skype, Facebook and Google are their flashlights into fact-finding.
Breeanna already had an interesting life — she was the daughter of two moms, who broke up when she was three. But it’s not as if she’s unhappy with her parents and is looking for another.
Speaking at the summer press tour earlier this year, she said “I think that I’m very happy with my family situation right now, and the whole entire journey, regardless of my parents being together or not, is something that I’m taking very
personally. Because I just graduated and I’m trying to figure out myself.”
As such, she added, “it’s a process that I’m going through sort of on my own. And now I have a lot of siblings to help me through it, which has been much needed. But I don’t think that it would be any different. But then again, I don’t know how it would have been.”
At first, she found two siblings in Atlanta, Hilit and Jonah, raised in suburban Atlanta. Then they found a pair of twins in California, Jayme and Jesse.
“Upon meeting each other you can definitely feel the connection,” Jayme said. “Even though,we had just met, I feel, wow, like, this is my sister, this is my brother.”
Just hanging out together, he said, “you can really tell that we all are related, and we have similar personalities. And it’s really interesting.”
It can be tough on a family when the kids go out to find the sperm donor, Hilit said. “It’s hard for my dad.” As a result, she’s one of the half-siblings who have decided they don’t want to meet the donor, if he he is found. Still, she’s supportive of Breeanna in her quest.
“To be completely honest, we’re kind of going along and figuring out how it’s going to work for us outside through the whole process, ” Breeanna said. “It’s not something that we just have down pat.”
But they are part of a substantial number of young people curious about their origins, according to Wendy Kramer, director of the Donor Sibling Registry. “We have 40,000 people on our website that are like these kids, that are looking
to find out where they came from. And MTV came to us interested in doing a show like this, and showing real life — what happens with these kids and their searching and finding, and why they search. And we came up with this great group of kids who are really a showcase for at lot of the other 40,000 people on our website that are searching and finding and redefining family.”
MTV denies there was much coaching involved in filming what the half-siblings wanted to do. But the finished product shows that they play up certain barriers as if they are bigger problems than they are; Will a half-brother agree to donate his DNA for a test? Will his father agree to sign for it?
Also, the network is there to help people who may be hurt by the process. “We we have been on this journey together with Bree and with her siblings and are learning as we go,” said Susanne Daniels, MTV president of programming. “And we have provided counseling in the case of ‘Catfish’ where things haven’t gone well for certain people who have been catfished. And we would do that for this show as well, for anyone who needed it.’