The frog in the pan

You've probably heard the old saw... put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will jump out and hop away. Put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually bring it to a boil and the frog will stay in the pot until it dies.

When it comes to Reality TV, I think we've become the frog in the pot of cold water.

I don't make a secret of the fact that I enjoy certain reality shows on TV. Not all of them, but the ones I like, I really like. Kinda like Alexander Keith's (that's a Canadian beer slogan for readers outside Canada). I love love love Big Brother. It's my favourite. I had given up on Survivor for a few years, but now I'm into it again (well, I was last season anyway...I missed the premier of the new season and will pick it up in episode two). I like The Apprentice, I've enjoyed what I've seen of The Week The Women Went.

But I've just come across a reality/game show that I think can only be described as deplorable. Loathsome. Inhumane. And the only reason anyone thinks it should be on TV, or that anyone could possibly want to watch it, is because we've been conditioned over the last eight years since the first Survivor, to tolerate increasing levels of inhumane and ridiculous behavior from both producers and contestants.

The show I'm referring to is called The Moment of Truth.

Essentially, before they go on the show, contestants take a lie detector test, answering several dozen questions about their personal lives. Then they go on the TV show and are asked a selection of the same questions...with their wives, children, parents etc. in the audience watching the whole thing. The point is to see how far people will go to win money by telling the truth, even if it hurts their loved ones, or even puts their livelihoods at risk.

The host...a no-name I've never seen before...seems to delight in rubbing salt in the wounds during the hard moments. He asks the contestant if he's ever resented his mother for how she's treated his wife. He answered - truthfully - that yes, he had. So the host turns to the mom and notes that she's crying and asks her if she's crying because of things her son has said or things he might say. It's about things he's said, she admits, wiping the tears away.

I mean...is that not cruel? Is it not bad enough that the poor idiot is willing to go on national TV and expose his shit-streaked underwear to the whole world? Does the host really need to turn to the family and poke his filthy little dagger into the wounds the contestant has just opened. Does he have to create that festering infection on top of the nastiness of the answers themselves?

This is sick. This is wrong. But, just like the American people who have swallowed the pestilential prick of the Patriot Act like it was a day-long lollipop, TV viewers seem to relish this show and are slurping at it like good little consumers.

And the final indignity of it is that, no matter what the true answer is, no matter how horrible, there comes a point where the contestant is either exposed as a liar or declines to answer, and is exposed anyway (for why would he decline if he was going to say something harmless?). It's the public torture of willing victims and it's sick.

I think we've just hit rock bottom as far as reality shows go. But the scary thing is... someone is probably, at this very moment, digging us an even deeper bottom.