There's A Knob on the TV Marked "Brightness"...But It Doesn't Really Work, Does It?....

I’m pretty sure that I have turned into my father.

Because when I was younger, I noticed that he spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder at whatever antics people of my generation were engaged in and, with an expression that can only be described as disdain bordering on contempt, offered up his very articulate assessment of whatever it was he was observing.

“Hmmph..”

And the sound was usually his considered opinion about some music I was listening to or some movie that I was raving about or TV show that I was watching.

The spelling of the sound was open to debate.
But I think it a safe bet that it only had four letters.

Lately, the noise has enjoyed a revival of sorts.

I’ve been making it.

And that can’t be good.

First of all, I’m not, by nature, as uptight about culture and its spillage as my father was in the day. After all, he was a professional man who did a nine to five with benefits and pension.

And I’ve been hanging around the frayed edges of entertainment and media, et al all of my working life.

I have a pretty high tolerance for crap.

But any envelope that is pushed will eventually reach its nadir.

And when the bottom of the barrel is found, the sound it makes isn’t the scraping noise you might expect.

Actually, it’s more like…
Hmmph.

Which brings me to “Moment Of Truth”.

This is the Fox show that precedes American Idol on Wednesday nights and if you haven’t seen it…you have my admiration and respect.

It’s a “game/reality” show where a contestant is brought on stage in front of family and/or friends and asked questions that they have previously been asked at an earlier time backstage while strapped to a lie detector. When they answer the questions on the “on air” portion of the show, if their answers “match” their previous answers, they start building up bucks on the way to a potentially big payoff.

Okay.
Seems innocuous enough.

But, even if you haven’t seen the show, you already know where this is going, don’t you? The questions go something like this…

“Have you ever had sex with one of your neighbors?”

“Would you sleep with your boss to get a raise?”

“Have you ever lied to your husband/wife about your sexual satisfaction?”

Sensing a theme here?

And, of course, the family and/or friends who will be most dramatically, even traumatically, affected by the “true” answers to these questions are sitting right there on the stage with the person in the hot seat.

So, picture the moment when the loving husband is asked if he has ever taken his secretary to a motel, answers yes, because he has to be truthful to win the money and the camera cuts to the face of the loving wife who is just finding out for the first time that her husband is a cheating weasel.

Admittedly, a cheating weasel who still has a chance to win a big buck payoff.

Which will very likely end up paying for the attorney he’ll need when she sues his sorry ass for divorce.

I’m reminded of a funny bit that the characters Larry, Daryl and Daryl used to do on the old Newhart Show.

They did a thing called “Anything for A Dollar”
And they literally were willing to do anything.
For a dollar.

It was so absurd and slapstick in the eighties that it was funny.

Now, we’ve “evolved” to the point where it’s happening for real in prime time.

And it’s not even close to funny.

I have never seen a complete episode of this show. I watched enough of one segment to get the drift and then I surfed on, feeling the oddest urge to take a shower.

I am a writer and humorist and satirist and I don’t have a stick up my butt and I’m not a prude and I think that envelopes need to be pushed and boundaries need to be stretched in order for us to grow as artists and as human beings.

And poking fun, making fun, even borderline ridicule of people can, in the right hands, be a sharp, entertaining, even ground breaking cultural event.

But humiliating people, even destroying marriages and/or families in front of a live audience?

It’s nothing more than the HDTV equivalent of those sideshow losers who bit the heads off of chickens.

Hey kids! That’s entertainment!

Hmmph.