The Reality TV Glut--It’s Unreal! : Television: Cheap to make and potentially lucrative, ‘reality’ programs are TV’s sizzling ticket.

Television speaks a misleading language.

On ABC recently, the “reality” series “America’s Funniest Home Videos” gave its grand prize to someone who uttered 50 parental sayings in 90 seconds and second prize to a talking dog.

If this is “reality” . . . if “Rescue 911,” “Cops,” “Top Cops,” “American Detective,” “America’s Most Wanted,” “Totally Hidden Video,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and “The Story Behind the Story” are known as “reality series” . . . if revisionist docudramas are “reality-based.” . . .

If all of these come under TV’s definition of truth--some of them even use dramatic re-creations with actors--are newscasts then fiction?

Programs that appear to be something they’re not, some more benign than others, are hardly new to TV. Yet now they’re proliferating as never before.

From venerable “infotainment” to the relatively new trend known as “infomercials”--slick half-hour commercials disguised mainly as talk shows--deception is the dark shadow spreading across TV.

Among other things, TV has become an electronic sting in which continual info-fibbing appears to have desensitized viewers to the harshest reality of all: Very often, they are being conned.

If the confusion doesn’t occur when we watch these programs, it may later, when TV’s thousand points of fact and fantasy coalesce into a single homogeneous flashback, each source of information blending with the other.

Because they’re cheap to make while being potentially lucrative, “reality” programs are TV’s sizzling ticket. With the networks about to announce their fall schedules, more than a dozen new “reality” series are candidates for prime time. The list under consideration ranges from a series using actual footage to re-create the lives of custom agents to one re-creating FBI cases to another re-creating actual stories “that defy human reason.”

This entire trend of using re-creations in a way that blurs fact and fiction often defies human reason. Take this week, for example, when America is confronted by the carnival reality of the May ratings sweeps.

At 8 tonight, CBS delivers “Haunted Lives . . . True Ghost Stories,” with Leonard Nimoy introducing dramatizations of “three real-life ghost encounters as recounted by the ordinary people who experienced them.” So ordinary that one of them meets a ghost in the stockroom of a toy store.

More spirits arrive at 9 p.m. Thursday on ABC’s “Miracles and Other Mysteries,” whose “fact-based” re-enactments include a Marine being saved from death in Vietnam when he hears the voice of his mother.

Then, James Earl Jones hosts re-enactments of “documented encounters with extraterrestrial life forces” on “Visitors From the Unknown: UFO,” at 8 p.m. Friday on CBS. These “real-life” stories include two men being “stopped by a blinding light and abducted by friendly alien beings.”

Back on unfriendly Earth, we have Bill Bixby hosting “An American Story” at 10 p.m. Thursday on CBS, a “reality-based” special that recounts an actual murder-manhunt through re-enactments and “documentary techniques.”

The point is that this isn’t a documentary. It’s an entertainment program that may be perceived as a documentary amid a TV minefield where mistaken identities increasingly explode in our faces.

Much more malevolent “documentary techniques” are the lethal weapons of choice on such intentionally misleading tabloid series as the syndicated “Hard Copy” on Channel 4 and “A Current Affair” on Channel 11.

On “Hard Copy” Monday, black-and-white re-enactments were used to simulate the kidnaping and killing spree of a serial murderer. Worse still was that night’s “A Current Affair,” which re-created the “official police report” of that alleged rape in the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach. Even though clearly labeled, the play-acting was appallingly irresponsible.

By weaving creepy music and comments from an actual Palm Beach police spokesman into its actor-performed “tale of terror,” the program gave credibility to the alleged rape victim’s story while virtually indicting the alleged offender, William Kennedy Smith.

At one stage, the actor playing Smith snarled “Stop it, bitch!” when the actress playing the alleged victim was depicted as trying to fight him off. Later, there was a close-up of him grunting.

Although “A Current Affair” gave some time to Smith’s attorney late in the half hour, this fleeting encounter with journalistic fairness did not begin to match the visual impact of the re-enactment.

TV’s layers of truths and untruths are not always identifiable.

How much truth was there in Monday night’s genial ABC special “Brides: A Tale of Two Weddings,” which traced wedding preparations of wealthy and working-class families? Although a soft entertainment program hosted by Delta Burke, it was formatted along the lines of the CBS News series “48 Hours,” with cameras appearing to capture a sort of cinema verite truth. But the close-up lens surely did more to shape reality than reflect it.

When it comes to reality, TV can ratchet up or down, depending on its own peculiar needs. NBC has sought to give its daytime “reality” series “TrialWatch” credibility by having actual attorney Lisa Specht join Rob Weller as co-host. For the last two weeks of the May sweeps, however, both are being sidelined by the higher-profile Robin Leach, as the “reality” switches to “The Glamorous and the Greedy” and “Hollywood on Trial.”

How much honesty is there, moreover, in NBC’s “Today” this week airing co-anchor Katie Couric’s three-part “behind-the-scenes” visit with the network’s prime-time series “L.A. Law”? Only recently having interviewed soldiers in the Persian Gulf, Couric is now herself a soldier on behalf of Nielsen ratings, as once again a news program is subverted for entertainment needs.

And how much honesty was there in KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” assigning one of its best reporters, Mark Coogan, to probe “the strange circumstances surrounding the death of Alfred Bloomingdale’s mistress, Vicki Morgan”? The tie-in was that Morgan’s murder loosely inspired the ABC drama “An Inconvenient Woman.”

So, naturally, Coogan’s heavily promoted “investigation” aired at 11 p.m. Sunday and Monday, the very nights that “Woman” aired, as once again a newscast tailored reality to fit the needs of news/entertainment cross-promotion and, in doing so, gave unwarranted credibility to a drama that Coogan himself conceded was an “interpretation” of the Morgan case.

On ABC’s program Monday about brides-to-be, Delta Burke said, “They’re not purchasing a dress, they’re buying a dream.” When it comes to TV’s “reality,” aren’t we all?