When I saw previews for Moment of Truth, I thought it looked awesome, like my new guilty pleasure had arrived... but I ended up hating it.

First, when I saw the preview, I didn't realize the questions were asked ahead of time. The lie detector test already happened, so the contestants know what will be asked. This takes away a lot of the excitement. Instead of people looking stunned and horrified, "Oh shit, how did they know?" -- you get people grimly concentrating on matching their answers with the previous test.

It also means, these people have no excuse. They knew the questions would force them to humiliate their partners on national television, and they still went through with the show. So I have zero sympathy for them, and I hope they lose the money.

As Heather said, the show drags on FOREVER. It's so slow. On top of that, the questions start easy (boring) and you don't even get to the deep personal secrets until you've watched them drag out three stupid questions for 30 damn minutes.

And when Ty confessed secrets that hurt his wife -- that sucked. It wasn't fun. It wasn't even very interesting. A husband who would want his wife to get liposuction, isn't sure she is his partner for life, touches other women... that's not fascinating. We all know guys like Ty. It's sadly pretty normal, and you just wish poor Catia would pull the plug and end the awkwardness.

I'm not going to watch next week, and I expect a huge drop in the ratings. Americans are desperate for entertainment during the strike, but we're not this desperate.

It's easy to mock television. In fact, as a kid I used to read Rex Reed's movie reviews to hear him do putdowns of actresses - like describing Nancy Sinatra as looking like a pizza waitress no matter how much of her daddy's money she spent on clothes. (Good thing the Sinatras weren't black, since such bitchy remarks directed towards African-Americans would have gotten the old mincing Dr. Pepper swiller branded as a racist.)

But that only goes so far. It's a bad habit for a dedicated critic to start doing. And even if attacking series like Eli Stone and Moment of Truth is as much fun as Dick Cheney in a pickup truck, shooting rabbits with multiple sclerosis (to borrow a line from Lewis Black) it's no less dishonorable.

It might have been better to note that Moment of Truth had a predecessor in the syndicated series Lie Detector, whose ultimate moment with a polygraph was having the one time porn star "Linda Lovelace" proving her statement that she only did the movie Deep Throat because her abusive husband forced her. It didn't get any better than that, and it got a lot worse. About the only thing Moment could do to surpass that would be to hook up Bill Clinton, to satisfy the Republicans who own Fox. It ain't never gonna happen, and that's the limit of the attention the critic should pay to the show.

Thanks much, Heather, for getting at one reason why ABC's shows just don't do it for me. I couldn't figure it out--I've been checking in first episodes of several of 'em (most recently DIRTY SEXY MONEY and CASHMERE MAFIA) for a while. They were well-cast, looked good, were relatively smart and funny. But they just didn't make me want to make them appointment viewing. There were just missing _something_--and it was the fact that basically I didn't care enough about these folks to put the time and energy into following their complicated plotlines for weeks on end. (And the same holds true for UGLY BETTY--as much as the lead is appealing and the show is a nice corrective to THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA-head, I just couldn't work up enough interest to follow it in real-time.) I suspect as well that a lot of these shows play better as DVD box-sets, when you can watch them all in one fell swoop and don't have to put so much into keeping up with them.

Ok, so I dunno if HH did get that Dirt Devil email or it popped into her head, but I think she's hot too. Heather teased me with the hope of the answer, and then let me down.

Even still, I'll take her review of In Treatment as a good sign. I was back and forth on watching it but, let's face it, there's a writer's srtike and what the hell else would I do? Read? Talk to my wife?

>I used to read Rex Reed's movie reviews to hear him do putdowns of actresses - like describing Nancy Sinatra as looking like a pizza waitress no matter how much of her daddy's money she spent on clothes. (Good thing the Sinatras weren't black, since such bitchy remarks directed towards African-Americans would have gotten the old mincing Dr. Pepper swiller branded as a racist.)<

And rightly so. :P The worst in this regard was theater/film critic John Simon, who was notoriously vicious towards actors who didn't fit his "white folks only"/physical perfection mold. And it was JS's "bad luck" to do most of his reviewing during the years when unconventional types like Streisand and Hoffman changed the acceptable media image template for good. One of the last reviews I recall him doing was a nasty slam at Denzel Washington when the latter did JULIUS CAESAR on Broadway. JS acted as if the very idea of a black actor doing the role was a desecration of Shakespeare and all of theater history. Have seldom seen a review that you couldn't half read because of all the reviewer's frothing at the mouth...:)

Sometimes TV offers excellence (The Wire), but mostly I turn to TV for fun; and, as Heather H. knows, there is fun to be had even in bad TV. For me, HH is what fun TV sounds like when it writes reflective essays.

But why, when I enjoy snarky meanness like Kathy Griffin and even some of the trashiness of reality shows, do I have a deep visceral reaction against shows like "Moment of Truth"? I have felt queasy just reading about that show. Last night I saw a movie trailer for an upcoming Naomi Watts film about a family that gets held hostage and terrorized by two sadistic white boys in tennis whites. So, a basic flick where you sympathize with the good guys who have to survive an ordeal, and you get some scare-thrills at their plight. But the trailer was cut with this grotesque point of view that kept playing up the sadistic humor of the two attackers. It was really putting the viewer in the role of the smug, hip terrorizers. I think of this mentality as "fox fun." It is fundamentally different from even the bitchiest humor of someone like Griffin, because it is rooted in pleasure at having power over someone weaker or distant.

I blame Republicans, of course. Fox is a certain Republican meanness turned into TV. Except for the Simpsons, which is TV fun at its best. Heather H and the Simpsons are guides to trying to salvage fun in an increasingly mean, sadistic America.