The Devil is in the Details

12/3/07

In its ever-continuing attempt to finally make television unwatchable, Fox Network has upped the bottom-scraping once again with its new game show “The Moment of Truth.” Now, I’m sort of a default Democrat, since I happen to care whether the planet’s weather system collapses and believe that old men shouldn’t be shot in the face, so I’m pretty much on the writers’ side in this whole strike situation. But if there’s one reason to be angry as a wet badger in a bag about it, it’s the fact that the strike will invariably increase the number of unscripted, “reality” programming out there, and “The Moment of Truth” is its whorish herald.
The show features “average” people strapped to a lie detector and asked devilishly embarrassing and personal questions such as:

· “Do you really care about starving children in Africa?”
· “Are you sexually attracted to one of your wife’s friends?”
· “Do fat people repulse you?”
· “Would you cheat on your wife if you knew you wouldn’t be caught?”
· “Do you think you will be with your husband five years from now?”

Whenever I told Hanni about this historic shit-pile, she asked me how you win at such a game. My first thought was, “Does anyone win?” The object is to answer up to 21 questions. If you answer all 21 honestly, you get $500,000. The player can stop the hemorrhaging at any time, but once a question is asked it must be answered. I suppose you could argue the people participating in this televised abortion of entertainment deserve what they get, especially since they know all of the questions they’re going to be asked. You see, in order to obtain a level with the polygraph, the contestants are asked 75 questions beforehand, 21 of which will be asked on air, in front of a live audience including your soon-to-be former loved ones. They aren’t told the results of the polygraph, so I’m sure a great number of these greedy lunatics figure they can beat the box.

Said friends and family are even provided with a button meant to “rescue” the contestant from a particularly spiky question. Naturally, since the type of people this show would attract are the ethical equivalent of week-old afterbirth, they never use it for the intended purpose. Instead, they dive for it like a lion on a bunny whenever a question hits them where they live. For example, when asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he dropped twenty pound of lard, the woman’s partner couldn’t jam that button fast enough. According Fox’s president of alternative entertainment Mike Darnell, “What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves.”
So, basically what you get to witness is the worst factions of human selfishness trotted out because of greed. Fantastic. Aside from the fact you’re watching a physical manifestation of the Id, the fact that polygraphs aren’t particularly accurate may give one pause. They’re dynamite for telling whether someone is nervous or not, but in determining the validity for a statement their accuracy has been put somewhere between 80-98% by the American Polygraph Association. That’s…a pretty big gap.

A version of the show originally aired in Columbia. Of course it did; the rest of the world is America’s testing ground for shows we can’t think of on our own. But in the Columbian show the questions were…a bit different. The show was temporarily taken off the air when a player confessed to hiring a hit-man to bump-off her goddamn husband. I would have loved to be in on the meeting where that question was thought up. What sort of ad campaign would you air during that show? Rat poison? Surprisingly, Fox has decided questions related to a felony aren’t going to be part of its package.

The really depressing thing about this whole matter is that I have just described something that will be wildly successful. Fuck you, you human bastards. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go empty the world of whiskey and try to forget all this.

Source: TV Week, Darnell in Defense of the ‘Truth’