AT the turn of the century, when the reality TV craze was young and scary (think Fox's scandalized shotgun-wedding conceit "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" or people caged in a house together on CBS' "Big Brother"), we speculated that this newfangled voyeurism was leading us toward televised death.
Reality TV, after all, would only get more depraved -- stakes raised, judgments clouded, further intimacies invaded. How, then, to explain why the most popular reality show on TV today is about underdogs-in-bloom, "American Idol" -- an innocent singing contest? (OK, an innocent singing contest with avaricious corporate tie-ins.)
Even the more craven stuff -- remember Fox's "The Swan," which delivered ugly ducklings to Los Angeles plastic surgeons? -- attests to the genre's most enduring appeal: Fame in a bottle, outsized attention that yields, most chillingly, to individual and collective identity. Nobody wants to see people die on TV; they want, over and over, to see how TV -- in the micro and macro sense -- can make them known.
Chuck Barris oughta know: In 1976, he gave birth to "The Gong Show," whose spirit was ahead of its time, with people making spectacles of themselves via queer talents or no talent at all and boozy, woozy comedian-entertainers serving as executioners, hitting a gong to stop the madness.
What Barris guessed too -- from "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game" -- is that people are malleable as populist entertainment, and that the home viewer would get off on their public triumphs but even more so on their shame.
Which is why the conceit behind Barris' new novel, "The Big Question," feels like a dated reality show parable, although the story begins in 2011, after the president has declared euthanasia legal and CNN has televised a Texas execution.
On "The Big Question," six people vie for $100 million in the ultimate Draconian contest: Answer the final question wrong and you die (by drinking poison for all the world to see).
Barris had a large hand in stirring the reality TV pot but then, it turned out, he wasn't around to revel in its actual boiling point. He became a Museum of Radio and Television footnote (e.g., his "Gong Show" featured a young David Letterman as a judge) then re-emerged in 2002 with the re-release of his kooky 1982 memoir, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," which revealed that he not only produced popular TV shows but, he claimed, also took side trips out of the country as a covert assassin for the CIA.
