TV Torture in Old Europe

The format was a copy of a controversial fake-electric-shock experiment by Yale professor Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. Milgram also made a documentary to underline how more than 60 percent of his subjects obeyed orders by a scientist to the very end of electric shocks. His experiment became famous, since it was conducted at the same time as the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

But his was an experiment. This was a performance.

AFP found critics of the French show, including psychologist Jacques Semelin, who found "elements of manipulation from the start ...They are obedient, but it's more than mere obedience -- there is the audience, the cameras everywhere." He pointed out that the participants signed a contract obliging them to obey the host's instructions, rendering this "experiment" fraudulent from the start. "I was afraid to spoil the program," said one contestant highlighted by Nick, whose grandparents were Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

It's one thing for people to refuse orders from an authority figure. But in a free country, the most imposing authority to the average citizen is the power of television, especially its power to promise fame and fortune.

Would it be fair now for America to suggest the French shouldn't lecture anyone else on moral superiority? Yes. And no. Washington Post TV critic Lisa de Moraes reminds readers that American "reality" TV manufacturers have literally pushed their plots to the point of death. MTV -- our kings of sensationalistic sleaze TV -- once created a show about addiction called "Gone Too Far." But there's a reason it never aired. Producers pressed their host, Adam Goldstein, to buy a crack pipe because they wanted the footage. Goldstein, a recovering addict who said he'd been clean 11 years, was found dead in his apartment three days after shooting ended on the show last August. Police found a cocktail of crack and prescription drugs in his system and a crack pipe in his apartment.

The Post critic couldn't find anyone in Hollywood to comment on the French experiment. She joked they were too busy fighting for the rights to create this spectacle in America. Then one unnamed executive called back and said he told a reality-TV producer he thought "it would make an interesting reality series to re-create some of the more bizarre social-psychology experiments." But it looks like Old Europe just beat America to the punch, that's all.