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Fox announces new 'Nothing But The Truth' lie detector game show

Fox announced it has ordered Nothing But the Truth, the working title of a new game show that will quiz contestants on personal questions and use a lie detector to determine if they're telling the truth.

Contestants competing on Nothing But the Truth will be hooked-up to a lie detector and asked to answer 21 questions without fibbing for the chance to win the $500,000 grand prize. Not surprisingly, the questions' subject matter grows more difficult with each correct answer given and -- as friends and family members watch from the studio audience -- owning up to the truth becomes harder.

Sample questions contestants could be asked include have you ever lied to get a job; do you like your mother-in-law; do you really care about starving children in Africa; have you ever stolen anything from work; and have you ever cheated on your spouse.

No Lie: TV Show Puts You to the Test

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Have you ever cheated on your wife? Stolen money from your boss? Do you consider yourself a better person than your mother-in-law?

Coming soon to U.S. television is a game show that has taken Colombia by storm. Similar productions are being sped up in Brazil, France and Britain. The concept: watch people squirm while they're interrogated.

The format of "Nothing but the Truth" is as simple as it is cruel: If the participants truthfully answer 21 increasingly invasive questions, they walk away with $50,000.

Tell a lie, though, and the lie-detector test they took backstage betrays them before a studio audience packed with unsuspecting friends and loved ones

Lie Detector was a television series on what is now ION Television (formerly PAX). Hosted by journalist and actress Rolonda Watts with assistance from polygraph administrator Dr. Ed Gelb, the show claims to "[examine] the truth behind real-life stories ripped from the headlines." It premiered on March 8, 2005 and ended after one season.

Its first episode featured a polygraph examination of Paula Jones, a woman who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment.[

werner herzog wrote:If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and – I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things.

yathrib wrote:Permanent Universal Television Avoidance, or PUTA. (Any Spanish speakers here?)

“In the real world, torture does not work like that.

This time the threat — and no, I'm not going to tell you what it is — seems too plausible. When I got to the shocker that ends episode 4, I could understand Jack Bauer's expression of disbelief; it's a perfectly human reaction to what has just happened. And yet at the same time I'm sitting in my office chair and thinking, This could really happen. And at some point, it probably will. I suppose my reaction was intensified by having just finished Nelson DeMille's excellent novel Wild Fire, which deals with a similar scenario, but mostly it was that clear and persuasive sense of plausibility. 24 doesn't always achieve that, but when it does, it's the best thing on TV. Really, no one does the old ''We're surrounded by enemies!'' bit better than Fox. Bill O'Reilly's going to love this baby.

"24 also remains fresh, I think, because it is regularly watered by the blood of supporting characters — the sort who used to be considered eternal. This grisly but effective ritual began with the murder of Jack's wife, Teri Bauer (Leslie Hope), in season 1 and reached its apogee last year, when writers and producers knocked off lovable teddy bear Edgar Stiles (Louis Lombardi). And just when you thought there was no one else worth mourning...along comes another of these shockers this year."

"Is 24 my idea of perfection in long-form TV? Indeed not. Just the most successful so far. That doesn't protect it from the occasional loopy plot twist (Kim Bauer and the cougar, case closed), the rather more frequent detour into the TV equivalent of Disney World (I couldn't believe who's president this time), or the sense — it usually sets in between episodes 16 and 20 — that the writers are stretching their material until it's almost thin enough to read a newspaper through. There's also a queasily gleeful subtext to 24 that suggests, ''If things are this bad, why, I guess we can torture anybody we want! In fact, we have an obligation to torture in order to protect the country! Hooray!'' Yet Jack Bauer's face — increasingly lined, increasingly haggard — suggests that extreme measures eventually catch up with the human soul."

This is what we have come to: Supreme Court justices citing Hollywood for constitutional principles:

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge's passing remark - "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jack Bauer do?' " - got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.
"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Lest we forget, Scalia was one justice dead-set against looking to international law for guidance last year:

Justice Antonin Scalia chastised the "arrogance" of U.S. judges who seek to decide politically charged questions involving gay rights and the death penalty by citing international law..... Scalia bemoaned a recent trend on the high court in citing international opinion to support decisions interpreting the U.S. Constitution, including those decriminalizing gay sex and banning the execution of the mentally retarded.

Got that? Fictional super-heroes are perfectly reasonable to introduce into panel discussions about the legality of torture. International judicial opinions, on the other hand, are to be discarded as un-American.

brekin wrote:I wonder how much of this is related to all the reporting about torture and interrogation? Could it be a collective way to normalize and/or process a lot of the heinous things the U.S. has been doing?

I was recently at a party and someone brought out this: