Unreal

I‘m not sure the show is immoral -- these are grown-ups, however feckless, and we are grown-ups, too -- but it is nevertheless a wings-off-flies brand of fun: The Cops-like pursuit-by-camera of a crying girl strikes me as tasteless emotional porn. It all seems to be headed where the producers would want it to (although they had to boot one couple for concealing the fact that they had a child), with vows of taking it to the next level and no regrets and such. “Nobody owns anybody. There’s not really such a thing as a boyfriend or girlfriend in a perfect place,” says one young man to one young woman not his girlfriend. Spoken like a dude, dude! Still, I don‘t know how it turns out -- maybe in the good old-fashioned Hollywood way. Or maybe they establish the new Utopia of free love our young man imagines. Or maybe it all goes to shit. In any case, I wish them all luck.

A more innocent reality constitutes The Mole, ABC’s top-rated “entertainment series” this season among the prized 18--34 demographic. In this series, based on a Belgian model that has already been franchised to Holland, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Poland, the U.K. and New Zealand, a team of five men and five women from the usual Variety of Backgrounds play spy, as they are whisked around France and Spain and I-don‘t-know-where-next, from location to scenic James Bond location, on the worst vacation in the world: Everywhere they go, they are made to take tests and solve puzzles and run through mazes and fight bulls and jump from airplanes and play laser tag, earning money for each puzzle they solve or “mission” they complete, while, in Survivor--Big Brother mode, they are whittled away, or “executed,” one by one, week after week. The tricky part is that one of them is a saboteur, out to foil their attempts while keeping hisher cover. Whoever finally unmasks “The Mole” -- and situations are arranged to create red herrings and destroy trust -- gets to keep whatever money the group has earned. The study here is how deeply everyone gets into the game; it’s kind of cute, really, all these grown-ups involved in a kiddie fantasy. They bicker and moan, certainly, but the show is at least not evil -- no more evil than, say, Clue is -- and in the real world according to television, that‘s something to be thankful for.