Memo to parents: You should check out what your kids are watching these days.
My personally-funded research institute informs me that younger viewers, let's say, 12- to 17-year-olds, watch after 11 p.m. and beyond. Too many TVs, too little parental control, obviously. And I'm not bothered if parents let their children stay up until they resemble little raccoons, but kids are kids, after all, and they are going to zap around the dial until they find something they probably shouldn't be watching. Like ElimiDate.
The ElimiDate concept has one lucky young dude who is assigned four young women, most often wearing low-rider jeans and thongs, for wooing purposes. Sometimes it's one woman and four guys, but rarely.
They go to sports bars and consume daiquiris. The women tear each other apart and threaten each other. The designated dude just grins. He is the man. ElimiDate is terrible trash.ÊÊ Also too unpleasant for young minds: Cheaters. People who suspect their mates are cheating contact a TV show that then assigns a film crew to get the goods on tape. It's cheaper than hiring a private detective. When the Cheaters people have the evidence, they show it to the cuckold, who is either tearful or enraged. They load the person into the Cheaters-mobile and drive them to catch their mate in the act. On most episodes, this results in a wrestling match outside a Mexican restaurant. Cheaters is the underbelly of syndicated TV.
But the show parents should really be worried about is Fear Factor, which a Canadian network has taken to repurposing at midnight, in place of, say, producing a Canadian talk show.
Fear Factor is TV's most irresponsible show. The stunts are pointless and needlessly dangerous. The female contestants seem to be selected by the size of their breast implants; the men look like carny folk.
On a recent Fear Factor: Couples Edition repeat, there was a young woman about to be put in a plexiglass box and covered with tarantulas and crickets.
She was hysterical, crying she couldn't do it, while her redneck husband kept saying, "C'mon, babe, the money." He forced her into the box, although they pulled her out before the bugs. It was one of the nastiest things I've ever seen on TV, and for the first time in a while, I wondered: What if kids are watching this?n