The Summer of Lost Brain Cells

Here’s one theory: Something in the devices the Nielsen ratings people attach to U.S. television sets is causing inadvertent lobotomies. Here’s another: We reached our evolutionary peak this past spring, and the summer is the beginning of what will be an apparently rapid decline.

Or maybe it’s only that American culture has given up. We’ll never be as clever or as cosmopolitan as the Europeans, so we’ve reached a collective, unconscious decision to surrender to our inner morons. Whatever you would hold responsible (were your brain still engaged enough for such high-level thinking), this is, undeniably, television’s Summer of Dumb.

Suddenly, less than a year removed from Sept. 11 and its predictions of a coming era of high-mindedness, dolt-fests are everywhere on the tube, and they are, almost all of them, dumbly drawing boatloads of benumbed viewers. Statistical probability suggests few, if any, of these people are watching with guns to their heads. Ordinary Americans are swarming voluntarily to such celebrations of cerebral vacancy as “Dog Eat Dog,” “American Idol” and “The Anna Nicole Show.”

They’re watching the blatant rip-off (of the movie “Meet the Parents”) that is the dumb reality show “Meet My Folks,” which in turn witlessly uses its air time to advertise another shameless “Meet the Parents” idea-swipe, the dumb upcoming sitcom “The In-Laws.” There are even people unrelated to any of the contestants who are watching “Big Brother 3,” the I.Q.-savaging series that provides the obvious answer to the question of what happens when you cram vain dullards into a camera-laden house. That answer: not the discovery of a cure for cancer.

The networks, especially NBC and Fox, have finally learned the lesson of “Survivor” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” two hits that debuted in summer: There is an audience then that is ready to embrace new material. Unfortunately for all of us, what’s being offered also gives a bear hug to the old theory that you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the public.

Now, I know what you’re saying. Relax, dude. It’s summer. This spate of empty-headed reality programming is just a little harmless diversion. So what if we finally have, after years of nothing but reruns during the balmy season, the television equivalent of beach reading? Bullfeathers. TV, never a meeting place for Mensa members, now has people flocking to their sets to see an apparently chemically stupefied Anna Nicole Smith simulating sex on a bed, talking to her intelligent teen son as if he’s a toddler and giving her court-awarded half of the cremains of her deceased octogenarian billionaire husband a tour of her new home.

My point is that these programs cannot be apologized away as guilty pleasures. They won’t have any effect on the fall season, which was already locked in place by the time they gained success. But let this kind of participant-debasing, brain-cell-consuming material gain a foothold, even in summer, and the next thing you know, instead of three “Law & Orders” and a “West Wing,” we’ll have an endless succession of low-talent talent shows and frantic contests that end with pies in faces and pants on backward. An exaggeration? Consider where we are already.

NBC’s “Dog Eat Dog,” a top-10 summer show, pits its cast of Joes so regular you wouldn’t trust them to spell “Joe” against one another in anti-intellectual feats of mulish strength and bovine humiliation endurance. The show’s fear factor, to borrow the title of a dumb-but-popular NBC show of longer standing, is the in-studio pool, a terrifying thing to creatures such as the Neanderthals who didn’t understand that we two-legged types can, you know, swim.

The contestants, who frequently wear little on top to take attention away from the word combinations that come out of their mouths, alternate between dimwitted taunting of one another and equally dimwitted (and insincere) cheering as they try to avoid landing in this glorified dunk tank. Then, at show’s end, the victor risks having his win nullified if his vanquished rivals can answer a series of trivia questions that wouldn’t stump a struggling third-grader.

Often, they cannot handle even these queries.

“Who is the current prime minister of the United Kingdom?” asks the host, the perpetually lingerie-clad Brooke Burns. “Thatcher,” answers the contestant, in the year 2002. (The answer, as it has been for years, is Tony Blair.) Ex-”Baywatch” babe Burns reads cue cards as if to an English-as-a-second-language class. But “Dog Eat Dog” ranks low in the summer’s top 10. Higher up, in ratings and buzz, is “American Idol,” Fox’s blockheaded version of a high school talent show. If you believe the hype, “Idol” is a sensation. It’s a summer wonder. It’s a national obsession.

It’s dumb.

What could be less intelligent than having Paula Abdul, for Pavarotti’s sake, pass judgment on other people’s singing? Or a studio audience that boos when “mean” judge Simon Cowell tells the inexplicably long-lived contestant Nikki McKibbin that she is out of her depth? Hey, people, guess what? She is, even in a shallow pool. And she needs to hear it now, so that she can go ahead and get a regular job.

The show is so dumb that three of the 10 finalists bore phonetically simplified first names: “EJay,” “A.J.” and “R.J.”And, dumbest of all, the show’s popularity-contest voting resulted in the most talented singer, Tamyra Gray, being voted off last week. Nikki and Justin Guarini remain, which is like voting off Whitney Houston but keeping, say, Paula Abdul. It’s not even smart to say this show is a huge hit. Yes, 13 million viewers in summer is a pretty big number; that is, after all, a 13 with six zeroes after it. But it’s still losing in the ratings to reruns of “CSI” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” It’s a moderate hit.

CBS’ “Big Brother” gets dumber and dumber with every passing year, brought back perhaps only to keep its host, slumming newsreader Julie Chen, in prime-time work.

What could be less mentally taxing than watching indolent people with nothing to do but whisper secrets to one another, apparently too dumb to realize that the microphones are picking up every word?

NBC’s “Meet My Folks” gives us a scenario in which three guys, usually, come to a gal’s house for a weekend, and her parents learn revealing things about them en route to picking one to go spend a week in Hawaii with her. It could instead be called, “Pimps, My Folks.” And so it ends up, like most TV dating shows, with smarmy people dating smarmy people. That’s a form, I suppose, of natural selection, a theory I used to think I understood before I started watching all this Summer 2002 TV.

Steve Johnson is media critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.