Does TV Provide Our Danger?

A 15-year-old student shoots up a suburban San Diego high school, killing two and wounding 13 others.

Nightmare.

A U.S. nuclear submarine crashes into a Japanese fishing boat, leaving nine missing and presumed dead.

Nightmare.

In the towns, villages and rain forests of Borneo, bands of Dayaks slaughter hundreds, perhaps thousands of Madurese, including children, beheading many and ripping out their hearts.

Nightmare.

Michael Skupin is taped fleeing to a pond with nasty hand burns on “Survivor: The Australian Outback,” and when the episode airs on CBS months later, some at CBS News and others in the media cover it as a major breaking story.

Hype.

Is it possible that many Americans no longer can separate actual conflict or crisis from the faux or whipped-up kind, so impenetrable are their brains after having blurs of TV images hurled at them, each appearing of equal weight?

Is it possible, also, that the real world doesn’t offer enough peril to satisfy the appetites of these thrill-starved TV viewers?

That’s what many in the industry must believe. Else why would they create so many “Survivoresque” TV shows that involve viewers vicariously--from the cushy safety of their homes--in dangers said to be facing an array of adventurers on the screen?

Listen to what’s coming:

“Rising out of the South China Sea is a land where explorers vanish, where exotic creatures live, where headhunting ended only 50 years ago. They call it the heart of darkness. They call it Borneo.”

No, not the Borneo of headless corpses and hearts of slain Madurese eaten by Dayaks in recent butchery bloodying the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan. More savage still, this is the Borneo of . . .

“Eco-Challenge.”

Airing on the USA Network next month after being taped last August--accounting for the intro’s premature headhunting reference--are four nights of “Eco-Challenge: Borneo” capsulizing a 12-day competition said to “punish, torment and take no prisoners.”

A teary voice: “We need immediate assistance on the bike course.”

And the Madurese think they have it bad.

Speaking here to viewers from time to time, as executive producer and founder of the annual “Eco-Challenge,” is none other than “Survivor I” and “Survivor II” creator Mark Burnett, the driven TV impresario who is becoming this milieu’s Vince McMahon of carefully charted spontaneity. The WWF doesn’t do it any shrewder than Burnett, whose 6-year-old “Eco-Challenge” has been telecast previously, but never before as what he calls “unscripted drama.”

Read that to mean swollen melodramatics.

This 320-mile race across water and rugged terrain was surely challenging on many levels, and most of the 304 participants from 26 countries tough, earnest competitors. Yet affirming that Burnett has not lost his marketing touch are three of the novices he chose to include.

Former Playboy centerfolds.

When two of them are forced ashore after their boat springs a leak, your pulse is pounding and heart in your throat as they labor to patch the hole, a camera in their telegenic faces.

“Status: Marooned.”

And when another U.S. team must drop out after a rule violation, that is accompanied by tears and heavy funereal music.

“Status: Disqualified.”

What’s more, another competitor is there after only recently learning to swim, another is competing with two cracked ribs, another is badly injured when tumbling over his bike’s handlebars, and two others, we’re told, “gamble on being caught in a fierce storm, risking their boat and, possibly, their lives.”

And viewers should care deeply? Keep in mind, no one forced anyone here--or “Survivor II’s” Skupin and his fellow camera-ready dabblers, for that matter--into daredevildom. Unlike the murdered masses in the Indonesian region of Borneo--south of the Malaysian sector where USA says “Eco-Challenge” was taped--these participants chose to expose themselves to risks. They had options.

Facing them are the leech-infested jungle and numerous other hardships, as we hear that “Team Playboy has to dig deep in the face of this relentless and unforgiving course.”

Former centerfold digging deep: “Look at my feet already.”

If you think that is tense, get a load of Fox’s coming “Boot Camp,” as the look and tone of “Survivor” extend to more and more of the TV landscape. These eight episodes are described as “a game of endurance and elimination, where your ally could be your worst enemy, and every strategy--including alliances--is inherently flawed.” Talk about originality.

Competing for $500,000 here is a squad of 16 “recruits” of both genders who endure “real-life military boot camp” run by four Marine drill instructors. Each week, one squad member is voted out by fellow “recruits.” Sound familiar? Before leaving, however, the ejected member, too, gets to oust someone.

In other words, NO ONE IS SAFE!!!!!

Not scary enough? Then try “The Scariest Places on Earth,” arriving soon on the Fox Family Channel. This series peeps and eavesdrops on fearless families that agree to stay in places haunted by “disturbed spirits.” Some of whom are surely the TV executives who scheduled this.

Question from Fox:

“Would your family survive being split up and dared to spend 24 hours alone in a 15th century Italian Castello renowned for the horrible deeds committed throughout the castle’s many walls?”

As for the cameras closely watching these isolated families battle terror? Operated by spooks, apparently.

This month also brings dicier thrills. One is “War Games” on TBS. “The winners . . . the losers . . . triumph and defeat,” says a voice about these traditional military exercises that are now being tailored for the couch-bound Walter Mittys watching TV.

One has soldiers of the 82nd Airborne trying to free “hostages” from an “island” held by an enemy also played by GIs. New TV wrinkle? Out there with them, feeling their pain, is “field reporter” Vic Chao.

The “island” is actually Fort Polk, La., and the “hostages” local civilians getting their 15 minutes in front of the lens. Chao, in a low voice inside a dimly lit room: “I’m being held . . . by this group of rebels, along with the townspeople taken from their homes, held . . . at gunpoint, cut off from loved ones, cut off from the world.”

Cut to “hostages” looking worried and cut off, as one of them frets: “They could come in here and kill us all in one minute.” Hello! It’s a game.

Then “tragedy strikes,” as the fighting and sounds of gunfire intensify, and we hear that “Sgt. Harper, the boy who dreamed of becoming a soldier, becomes a casualty of war.” Really into this gig, Chao castigates the enemy for hiding “like cowards, behind their captives.”

In a way, this seems less surreal than the Gulf War did on TV, when tracers lit the night skies over Baghdad, Scud missiles flew wildly and reporters flinched nervously while delivering stand-ups in front of cameras.

Except Chao is no war correspondent, there are no captives, Sgt. Harper is not dead, and this is no real conflict, even though it’s played with such epic fervor that you half expect Tom Hanks to burst in and save Pvt. Ryan.

Not a bad idea if “War Games” hopes not to be outdone by Burnett, whose deal with USA Network also includes next fall’s “Combat Missions,” its four-person teams of veterans from Navy SEALS, Green Berets and other special-forces units competing in “staged military missions” that USA says test “the limits of physical ability, tactical strength and mental discipline.”

To say nothing of the public’s capacity to be manipulated, at times even willingly.

Not that much of this won’t be on the level, only that given Burnett’s track record and proven gift for the con, a lot of hokum will come with it, leaving you wondering what he and his imitators will do next to raise the bar.

Are there haunted huts in Borneo?

* “The Scariest Places on Earth” can be seen on Fox Family, March 26-31 at 9 p.m., then on Fridays beginning April 6.

* “Boot Camp” can be seen Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on Fox beginning March 28.

* “War Games” can be seen Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on TBS beginning March 28.

* The four-part “Eco-Challenge: Borneo” can be seen on USA Networks, April 1-4 at 8 p.m.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.