‘Fear Factor’ Cries Out for Reality Check

Here at Television Science Laboratories, our researchers have devised five stunt challenges to put well-deserved terror into the makers of the new NBC reality series “Fear Factor,” which has all the idiocy of MTV’s “Jackass” but none of its Beavis-gets-a-reality-show charm.

Disclaimer: Television Science Laboratories engages in no live-mammal testing, but wholeheartedly supports experimentation on television producers and other gastropods.

Challenge No. 1: Spend three minutes in a sturdy refrigerator box teeming with good TV critics. Your show, which pits six young adults in a sort of obstacle course of putative gross-outs and big scares, is flat-out terrible. The contestants move from one stunt (get dragged by horses) to another (get swarmed by rats in a box) to another (crawl around a wet car suspended in midair), with the most enduring soul winning all of $50,000. It’s an anything-for-a-few-bucks exploitation that seems better suited to a nation with low literacy rates and an abiding cultural blood lust.

The critics in that box would eat you alive (even while, granted, critics of the critics would enjoy the implicit comparison of them to rats; we hasten to point out that rats are a higher order of species than gastropods). Even more gross than the initial munching, they would surely spit you back out.

Challenge No. 2: Force your children to watch every minute of every “Fear Factor” episode. They too deserve the opportunity to learn such lessons as: Doing stupid things for fast money is smart (as in, say, drug-dealing); and doing whatever it takes to be at least on the fringes of the entertainment business is prudent (as in pornography). Oh, we forgot--they already know those things. They have you as parents.

Your lovable little moppets may also, despite (because of) your show’s introductory disclaimer, be moved to imitate some of the stunts you have chosen to present to other children in America, the audience segment most likely to be impressed by your show. Although we don’t like to see the sins of the parents visited upon their offspring, we have to acknowledge there would be a kind of rough justice to this.

Challenge No. 3: Kiss the back pockets of a gantlet of network executives. What’s that you say? Already passed that one? Congratulations. We see that you even got the suits at NBC who put your show on their prime-time airwaves (we’ll deal with them later) to bill this not as a “reality series,” but as an “alternative series.”

Yes, as in “alternative to First World television.”

Challenge No. 4: Ride a hippopotamus--bareback. Our fourth stunt challenge makes no real point about the show, no matter how hard we think about metaphors involving swamps and zoos and big fat leathery beasts. We’d just like you to have to do it, as punishment.

Challenge No. 5: Go to, say, Goshen, Ind. Visit the Kiwanis Club’s annual Halloween House of Horrors. It’ll terrify you in the way the kicker at the end of a “Twilight Zone” episode used to always terrify the episode’s subject.

You will realize, in that chamber of cheese-ball horrors, where teenagers plunge their hands into damp linguine and scream because they’ve been told it’s worms, that your show is simply this very small-town gimmick writ a little larger. It’s a series of bowls filled with wet noodles, and you deserve a lashing.

* “Fear Factor” can be seen tonight at 10 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be inappropriate for children younger than 14).