So You Thought TV Couldn’t Get Any Worse?

Dumb TV . . .

Evidence of the decline of Western civilization comes in Nielsen ratings showing that about 7.5 million viewers returned for Monday’s second episode of Fox’s new comedy series starring Pauly Shore. The premiere drew nearly 10 million, some of whom may even have been potty-trained.

Dumber TV . . .

For more evidence of severe dementia, try the syndicated “Bzzz!” At least “Pauly” is fiction performed by actors. But people on “Bzzz!” embarrass themselves as themselves, from annoying host Annie Wood to the contestants in their 20s who, in their own yuppie way, are nearly as witless as the human bricks available on the worst of daytime talk shows.

“Bzzz!” is essentially a remake of “The Dating Game,” in which contestants select suitors based on their answers to inane questions such as: “If we were watching television together, do you have a special channel-switching technique?” The last few minutes of the show are reserved for all of the neo-bachelors and neo-bachelorettes who have taken part to emerge from behind a curtain and dance. You’d swear they were attached to strings.

The show’s stupidity is relentless, seeming all the more so in Los Angeles because it airs weeknights on KTLA-TV Channel 5 in a time slot preceding reruns of NBC’s “Seinfeld,” a series as intelligently written and executed as “Bzzz!” is inane and insipid.

Still dumber TV . . .

Freeway Chase No. 10 Kadzillion qualifies. That would be Monday’s live chopper coverage by several stations of a motorist chased by cops who said they spotted him illegally driving alone in a carpool lane. Ooooooh!

You couldn’t find this story’s pulse with a Geiger counter. Yet the stations’ tenacious vacuity appeared to pay off when the motorist abandoned his car in a residential neighborhood and ran into a house.

A hostage situation? Calling all news vans!

Yet what a TV bummer, for, as viewers were told later, the house the suspect fled into was, well, his own.

Police encircled it. Media gathered. Neighbors gathered. Later, the alleged Notorious Car Pool Lane Fugitive surrendered with no fuss.

What a difference 10 days make. Live coverage of the recent North Hollywood shootout was not only merited, given its wide impact, but also produced one of the most spectacular TV stories in years. Way to go!

But gratuitous news chopper sprees over police chases--usually when the pursuing reporters don’t even know the reason for the pursuit--are utterly absurd. They will endure, however, in an era when news on TV is increasingly driven by technology and defined by “action.”

Monday’s chase coverage was especially idiotic, with the suspect also getting sizable chunks of exposure in late-evening newscasts, including close-ups of him being removed in handcuffs as if he were Charles Manson instead of a guy on the lam suspected of being a carpooler of one. And someone who declined to immediately surrender, police said later, because he had several outstanding warrants.

TV is the great homogenizer, where items of strikingly unequal significance are often given false parity. That was the case Monday, when a number of major Los Angeles stations wisely also gave live coverage to three press conferences resulting from the Los Angeles Police Commission’s decision to not grant Chief Willie L. Williams a second five-year term. The way the day’s live coverage was parceled on some stations, however, the press conferences seemed no weightier than a fleeing man accused of being a carpool lane violator.

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Even more excruciatingly dumb TV . . .

“Sally Jessy Raphael” or “Jerry Springer”? It’s a toss-up which of these talk shows is more of a doofus.

You can’t discount motherly Sally, who bears tissues for the teary and is shown during supposedly candid “What Happened During the [Commercial] Break” segments comforting her distressed guests. What a bag of bull she is.

Yet she has nothing on Jerry, who Monday delivered one of his more memorable efforts. Not low brow, no brow.

The advertised topic--”I’m Having Your Husband’s Baby!”--didn’t even apply to the entire show, not that many of its viewers were likely to have noticed, given how hard it is seeing the screen with a net thrown over you.

Jerry: “If you’ve just joined us here, Veronica, who is 15, has been confronting her dad, who has been sleeping with a woman other than her mother and has made that other woman pregnant.”

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Out came the mother and the other woman. The daughter screamed at her father’s mistress. Then the wife railed at the mistress. Then the husband screamed at his wife, which was more than the sanctimonious Jerry--whose show routinely books these minors without compunction--could tolerate: “Wait a second, your daughter is sitting here!”

Poor Jerry. It’s not easy feeling their pain.

Meanwhile, the studio audience was whooping it up and laughing at these defectives. But the show was just starting, for up next were Gavin, who thought his girlfriend was pregnant with his child, and the unsuspecting real father, Jeremy, along with the exciting Hannah, the expectant mother of Jeremy’s child who was scheduled to reveal the truth to both of these clods in front of the camera.

Gavin was so overwhelmed by the news that he hung his head and couldn’t speak.

Jeremy refused to believe he was a father: “No! No! No! No!”

Nor could anyone with an IQ above 25 believe these three were on the level (which apparently excluded the highly aroused feral studio audience). They were awful actors like you’ve never seen, something that Jerry appeared to detect but that his talent bookers apparently did not. Either that or they didn’t care, one way or another.

To demonstrate her sincerity, Hannah supposedly took a pregnancy test backstage. While that was happening, Jerry brought on Stephanie, who was pregnant by Ryan, husband of Dawna, who was also present so that both women could call each other tramps while the sullen Ryan slouched in the chair between them. Dawna: “She ain’t gonna get nuthin’ outta him!”

Then it was time for the return of Gavin, Jeremy and Hannah, and for Jerry to reveal that Hannah didn’t get nuthin’ outta her pregnancy test, meaning she ain’t gonna have a baby. Gavin again was speechless. “What’s goin’ on?” asked Jeremy, who couldn’t out-act even Pauly Shore. “I wasn’t lying,” insisted Hannah, who couldn’t out-act even Jeremy or Gavin.

Jerry sounded pretty sure that all three were lying. And in his usual commentary afterward--the one where he self-righteously lectures his wayward guests on morality--he reckoned that untruthful participants “trivialize the problems of the rest of our guests who pour out their hearts to the rest of America.”

At that point, you felt like pouring Jerry and his dumb TV into a bottle and sealing it with a cork. Failing that, time to heed “Bzzz!” and use your best channel switching technique.