TV So Bad That Shame Isn’t in Its Vocabulary

Television is the medium America loves to hate. But some things on television are more lovable-hateable than others. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of TV that is watched to be loathed. This kind of TV isn’t so bad it’s good. It’s just so bad it takes on a weirdly seductive quality all its own.

It might be called “cringe viewing”--programs and commercials you watch just because they’re so magnificently awful you can’t quite resist them. This is TV you laugh at, not with. It’s Road-Kill TV. It offers a gruesome spectacle that you find yourself slowing down to see.

The kings of cringe for years have been daytime talk shows, programs like Ricki Lake’s, Jerry Springer’s and, worst and lowliest of all, Richard Bey’s. On these shows, “real people” are invited to haggle and bicker with one another, pull hair and shout insults while a studio audience hoots and urges them on. The programs are shameless orgies of mass humiliation.

But this trend seems to have peaked, and several daytime talk shows died last season (among them, those of Charles Perez, Tempestt Bledsoe and Danny Bonaduce). The new standard-bearer in cringe viewing is probably MTV’s hilariously embarrassing “Singled Out,” an update on “The Dating Game” of the ‘70s and “Studs” of the ‘80s, with all the exhibitionism and innuendo of both.

The program airs twice daily (at 7 and 11 p.m.). On each edition, 50 young women and 50 young men are corralled together in a studio to vie for dates with two available cuties, one of each sex. The format calls for all those involved to make themselves look as ridiculous as possible, diving face-first into pies, wiggling their fannies or parading around in drag. It’s excruciating and entertaining. It’s excrucia-tainment.

In the final round of the game, three finalists have to make quick choices that match those of the desired date. Recent example: “Itchy butt--Fight it off or scratch away?” The preferred answer, for what it’s worth, was “scratch away.” Obviously, “Singled Out” is the kind of show that should be put in a time capsule for future generations to ponder.

It would be thoroughly terrible if not for the two hosts: Chris Hardwick, a young man who has the decency to appear mortified the whole time (he looks like a dog left out in the rain), and Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy Playmate and the most fantabulous new TV personality of the decade. Incredibly pretty, perfectly configured and more energetic than all the Rockettes put together, Jenny is a mad angel from TV heaven.

Then there are are numerable cases of semi-cringe TV. Those awful infomercials with studio audiences who cheer wildly when a grease spot is removed from a rug (where do they get these people?); “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” those badly acted and poorly written atrocities from Fox; “The Gossip Show” on cable’s E! channel, with manic hostess Julie Brown making a complete spectacle of herself every day; and CNN’s “Talk Back Live,” a bargain-basement talk show whose studio audience members look like hostages.

We measure cringe viewing with a device called the Squirmometer: How much does the subject in question make you squirm as you watch?

Rating low on the meter, but still squirm-inducing are: Paul Shaffer’s imbecilic braying on “Late Show With David Letterman”; John McLaughlin’s fatuous blustering as host of “The McLaughlin Group”; those soap-operatic Taster’s Choice commercials about the two caffeine-addicted honeybunches; and all the “real-life” cop shows that feature actual people in the humiliating act of being arrested.

These and so many other examples help make American television the greatest cringe machine of all time. Sometimes, sadly, it seems that making us squirm and blush is what TV does best--and that may be the creepiest cringe of all.