Going down

Temptation Island and The Mole, plus TV's five-year plans

by Robert David Sullivan

'Temptation Island'

At least Fox got the title right with Temptation Island (Wednesdays at 9 p.m.). By the end of the excruciatingly boring second episode, I was tempted to disconnect my cable -- with my teeth, if necessary. Unfortunately, last week's Nielsen ratings confirmed that the show is a hit. It's no Survivor, but Temptation Island easily won its time slot among viewers under 50. It seems only yesterday that I was cursing the geriatric set for the continued existence of Touched by an Angel and Diagnosis: Murder, and now I have to thank them for keeping The West Wing on the air.

The six-episode Temptation Island places four unmarried couples in a tropical beach setting, along with 26 allegedly attractive singles who work as a tag team to try to break up each pair of young lovers. It's been widely reported that all four couples left the island intact (with one being evicted early because Fox discovered that they had a child hidden on the mainland), but the lack of suspense may only add to the show's popularity. Guys can now safely watch Temptation Island with their girlfriends, enjoying all the skin while knowing that the series will ultimately end in a celebration of monogamy. It's like a chick movie without Celine Dion on the soundtrack.

Both the coupled and single men on Temptation Island are wimps, but that probably doesn't concern male viewers. (They're not watching this to find role models.) One of the "players," if they can be called that, whined that some of the single women are "crocodiles" who will "stop at nothing to get us." Another complained, "I think they're fun, but there's a few sharks in the mix." Of course, all this could be for the benefit of their girlfriends. If any of these guys is the cheating type, he might see Temptation Island as a way to inoculate himself against future accusations. Once he passes the test, resisting the charms of self-absorbed models surrounded by camera crews, he may feel the coast is clear to diddle with the insecure and unthreatening receptionist at work.

Women may feel that they're supposed to love Temptation Island because the girlfriends are given just as much chance to wreck the relationships. But they're not given much opportunity to trade up on this show. There was one scene last week where the girlfriends sat in beach chairs and commanded all the single men to "audition" for them; most of the guys couldn't come up with anything better than dropping their pants. Alas, creative editing prevented us from seeing any moon shots.

Then again, Temptation Island may be another byproduct of the misguided "just say no" crusade against sex. (See "Christian Sex Outlaws," by Michael Bronski, in the News & Features section of last week's Phoenix.) The show seems to encourage players to look and sound like sluts without actually going over the line into slut behavior -- sort of like a concert by self-proclaimed virgin Britney Spears, or the Price Is Right game where you have to guess the price of an item without going a penny over the "actual list price." (If there were married couples on Temptation Island, the question would be, "How low can you go before you'll need to hire a divorce lawyer?") If the leaks are accurate and none of the Temptation Island players gets caught cheating, the series finale will probably include tributes to their high moral standards. But the show is based on the assumption that the only definition of "unfaithful" involves sex, as if there were nothing hurtful about revealing all your partner's shortcomings to a complete stranger (not to mention a national television audience). There may not be any used condoms on Temptation Island, but people are still getting screwed.

'The Mole'

ABC'S THE MOLE (Tuesdays at 8 p.m.) isn't as crass or as popular as Temptation Island, but it's almost as dumb. It's mostly a lavish update of the 1950s game show Beat the Clock, overlaid with baffling rules that are supposed to cross The Real World with Mission: Impossible. Set in various resort locations, it features a group of Americans working as a team in various silly contests -- for example, finding the player who's been "kidnapped" and put in the same French prison that once held the Man in the Iron Mask. When they win, money goes into the pot that will be claimed by the final contestant. The show started out with 10 contestants, but one is actually the title vermin, slyly working to sabotage everyone else's efforts. At the end of each episode, one player is "executed," but not through anything as dramatic as a Tribal Council. Instead, everyone takes a computerized quiz about the identity of the "mole" (e.g., "Is the mole a man or a woman?"), and the person with the lowest score is kicked out. After someone named Afi was executed last week, another player said, "I didn't expect it to be her." Well, how could anyone expect anything from such a method? It would be more interesting to use a roulette wheel.

The only amusing aspect of last week's episode transpired when three players were sent to a French village to get a jeweler's help in distinguishing a real Cartier watch from a knockoff. At first, they were stymied because none of them spoke French, and that raised the shocking possibility that ABC might air a program making Americans look foolish for being stubbornly monolingual. But the players found a cooperative native who could speak enough English to help them make a lucky guess. Despite the happy ending, this segment was an Ugly American trifecta: a marksman was on hand to shoot the watch that the contestants picked as the fake, whether they were correct or not. Thus, we got violence and wastefulness to go with our stupidity.

NEITHER TEMPTATION ISLAND nor The Mole is likely to overshadow Survivor II, which premieres after the Super Bowl on Sunday before settling into a Thursday-night slot opposite Friends. NBC is countering by adding an extra 10 minutes to Friends and filling out the hour with new comedy sketches from the cast of Saturday Night Live. Neither tactic is likely to work. The Friends crew isn't likely to put much creative effort into scenes that are only going to be snipped out of reruns. And there's no reason to worry about missing a funny SNL bit: if they come up with a sketch that's even slightly amusing, it's going to be rerun hundreds of times over the next few years. The only suspense is in whether CBS's programming moves will drive the sit-com even farther toward extinction, since Survivor II will be followed by the hit crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation opposite NBC's Will & Grace. (NBC already did its part in this effort by moving the hour-long romantic comedy Ed to Wednesdays and crushing Bette Midler's sit-com.)

AS IF THE RETURN of the shiny-but-tasteless NYPD Blue weren't depressing enough, last week ABC renewed another rubber tomato, The Practice, through 2004. This means that Dylan McDermott and his fellow lawyers will be dealing with bizarre murder cases at least until the middle of the next presidential campaign. Apparently, ABC intends to keep airing the show whether viewers continue to like it or not. (How appropriate that the announcement was made only a few days before the White House inauguration of George W. Bush, who hasn't let his loss in the popular vote overshadow the more important fact that he was riding high in the polls two years ago.) The Practice joins a growing number of prime-time series with multiple-year extensions, including ER and Law & Order; the sit-coms Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier will probably join the list shortly. Over in the premium-cable arena, HBO had already renewed The Sopranos and Oz for 2002 without waiting to see how this year's episodes would fare with viewers.

There are logical reasons for these long-range renewals. Rising production costs give networks an incentive to lock in producers and cast members for several years, even at salaries that seem ridiculous today. (It's reported that ABC will pay more than $5 million per episode for The Practice, and NBC has committed to $13 million per episode for ER.) With the prime-time audience splintered among six networks and dozens of cable channels, it's increasingly difficult to get viewers to sample new shows, so a familiar title like NYPD Blue is valued even if it's not as popular as it once was. And if Hollywood does shut down later this year because of writers' and actors' strikes, it will be easier to resume production (whenever that is) with established series than with new ones.

But good economics don't make for good television. In theory, one of TV's strengths is its short production time. Over the past 25 years, Hollywood films have become expensive and bloated, and they're frequently out of date by the time they reach theaters, after years of re-editing and focus-group testing. By contrast, TV can move at rapid speed. An episode of a high-quality drama series may be aired only a few weeks after the script was completed. The early years of Law & Order had this urgent quality -- "ripped from the headlines," the NBC promos incessantly tell us now, as the series slips further into an overproduced parody of itself.

Similarly, when NYPD Blue premiered in 1993, it was a welcome alternative to the sequels and remakes clogging up movie theaters. Now every episode of NYPD Blue is a sequel to the previous week's episode (continuing a story line we don't care about) and a remake of an episode from years ago (ho-hum, Internal Affairs thinks Sipowicz and his pals are "dirty" again).

With all the Five Year Plans, the television industry is beginning to resemble Maoist China, a society not known for its playfulness. It takes a little bit of the fun out of The Sopranos to know that the show is coming back next year, whatever happens this spring. (The season premiere is on March 4.) This time around, in contrast to the first season, we know that Tony Soprano isn't going to be killed, and that he won't be retiring from the "waste-management business."

I'm still looking forward to The Sopranos and Survivor II, but it's getting tougher for me to justify my loyalty toward prime-time TV when even the best shows are just going through the motions. Talk about testing a relationship . . .