[T]he questions are designed to be extremely personal. Embarrassing, even. Humiliating, better yet. And you can’t fib your way out of it because every word has been vetted by a lie detector machine. If the machine thinks a contestant is lying, the game is over and all the money they’ve accrued by answering questions truthfully, vanishes…. Worse, it’s a show that preys on the worst instincts of everyone who stumbles into range. For contestants, it’s the lure of easy money. For viewers, it’s the awful attraction of watching another person’s self-destruction, right there on TV, in the comfort of your living room. “The Moment of Truth” is, in short, a gruesome little slice of hell.
The Oregonian’s television critic, Peter Ames Carlin, writes an interesing column/blog about all things television. It’s appropriately titled Idiot Box, I imagine because he runs across so much “entertainment” that truly is geared for the lowest common intellectual denominator. His latest review is on Fox’s new reality series, The Moment of Truth. The premise is truly awful, the commercials for it are beyond disturbing, and I can’t even begin to imagine what the episodes themselves must be like. I can’t bring myself to watch and be party to televised emotional train wrecks staged in the name of entertainment and the pursuit of ratings.
When you begin to wonder just how desperate some folks are to get themselves on television, you really need look no farther than The Moment of Truth. I cannot imagine a circumstance under which I’d be willing to subject myself to that sort of embarrassment and potential damage to my reputation and relationships with those I care about. Yet there are apparently plenty of folks willing to put themselves and their marriages in serious jeopardy for their 15 minutes of fame and the opportunity to win a large sum of cash. I hate to be one to parrot the tired old canard about the decline of Western civilization, but ya gotta wonder….
It’s also the most popular new show to hit American television in more than a year.
More than 23 million viewers sat through “Truth’s” first episode on Jan. 23. Nearly that many beelined back to its second and third installments. And though having “American Idol” as a lead-in certainly didn’t hurt the show’s drawing power, no other show given the same time slot has come close to matching “Truth’s” audience retention numbers.
America, for good or ill, loves “The Moment of Truth.”
Or, to put it another way, America can’t resist the crazy allure of seeing some poor sap implicate himself in terrible misdeeds to satisfy the needles of an unyielding, if not-quite-scientific, machine.
We just LOVE a good train wreck, don’t we? I suppose that on some level it makes us feel better about our own miserable, pointless existence when we watch someone else self-destruct. You may be embarrassed for the poor fool, but at least it’s not you who’s having to answer deeply and disturbingly personal questions.
I don’t know what this says about us as a society, but whatever it is, it can’t be good. The fact that The Moment of Truth is disturbingly popular speaks to the same mentality demonstrated in an old experiment. You might remember the experiment…where subjects were ordered to deliver increasingly severe electrical shocks to a subject they couldn’t see but could very definitely hear? Right, and when you begin thinking that the Holocaust could NEVER happen in this country, because Americans don’t blindly and unquestioningly follow orders…. Like anyone other society, we thoroughly enjoy the suffering of others if we’ve determined that a similar fate can’t and won’t befall us.
So, what’s next? Televised executions? Incest for fun and profit? Choreographed gang rape? The Torture Channel? The Famine and Pestilence Network? Reality shows that follow serial killers on their rounds? The possibilities are endless, and while you might laugh at the aforementioned possibilities, I’d hazard a guess that some network- probably Fox- will find a way to push the envelope of acceptability incrementally until we become inured to- and, indeed, come to demand- suffering, humiliation, and degradation on a regular basis. Who needs Hollywood Squares when you can watch fathers raping their daughters in order to win thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars? And don’t think it couldn’t happen.
Where- and when- do we draw the line?
