Even On Game Shows, The Truth Shall Bring You Grief

LOS ANGELES (TNA) – Would you cheat on your spouse if you knew you could get away with it?

Do you find any of your spouse’s friends attractive?

Some questions should never be answered truthfully.

Host Mark L. Walberg prepares to get the truth out of Krissy, a participant on 'The Moment of Truth,' a game debuting Jan. 23 on Fox.

Giving honest responses to loaded questions is like mowing grass in a minefield: It’s only a matter of time before something blows up underneath you.

Depending on the nature of the question, the consequences of an honest answer can range from public humiliation to a ruined relationship to arrest and trial (in which case the truth absolutely won’t set you free).

Yet Fox’s new game show, “The Moment of Truth,” in which contestants are strapped to a polygraph and then thoroughly probed in the true-or-false equivalent to a public rectal exam, has people naively clamoring to participate.

The show debuts Wednesday, Jan. 23, and already there have been casualties.

“No marriage break-ups yet and I sure hope one doesn’t end because of our show,” says Howard Schultz, the show’s creator and executive producer. “But I can tell you that there was a young man on the show and his girlfriend was sitting on the family-and-friends couch and, on the drive home from the show, they broke up.

“There were questions posed to him about his thoughts about the relationship that obviously caused her great concern and that’s what caused her to break up with him. He spent the next month and a half trying to get her back and we just found out that he just got her back.”

But did he learn his lesson? Will he, in the future, know to dodge any and all relationship-killer questions? Schultz promises that future episodes will feature follow-up segments on past contestants. Maybe at that time, the dude with the volatile girlfriend will tell America what he learned the hard way: Some questions should never be answered truthfully!

Alas, the $500,000 prize, awarded for honestly answering 21 questions of increasing difficulty, apparently is too great for many people to resist the lie-detector treatment. There has been no shortage of contestants and Schultz expects to be “deluged” with volunteers after the show airs.

“We don’t hold a gun to their heads to come,” Schultz notes.

Yet it’s worth emphasizing that Schultz didn’t sign any half-million-dollar checks for any of the earliest participants.

So please, people: Think long and hard before willingly planting your butts in the hot seat.

Have you ever lied to get a job?

Have you ever stolen anything from work?

Maybe playing “The Moment of Truth” wouldn’t be quite so dangerous if the show stuck to generic questions. But the producers go the extra mile to make it as squirm-inducing as possible. They investigate a contestant’s life with the tenacity of a private detective. They want the hot-seat subjects to sweat.

“When we find a participant, we custom design the questions, based upon who’s sitting in the chair,” Schultz says. “We do a lot of homework. We call their families, their friends, their co-workers, their high school chemistry teachers. We reach deep into these people’s lives to create a mosaic of who they are. We really do get a pretty complete picture of who this individual is.”

Then, armed with 50 or more explosive questions, they subject the contestants to pre-show polygraph tests conducted by a certified polygraph examiner. The producers then winnow the list of questions to the final 21 to be asked on TV -– meaning the participants know which questions could be coming, and which ones might cause trouble, especially with friends and family present.

Yet, remarkably, people still embrace these uncomfortable situations.

Krissy finds that a question from "Moment of Truth" host Mark L. Walberg is harder to answer than she anticipated.

Says host Mark L. Walberg, “There are times when I’ve said to them, ‘You’ve already got a lot of money. I really don’t want to have to ask this question. Please, don’t make me read it.’ And they say, ‘Bring it on.’ What I love about the show is there is so much power in the seat of the participant.

“They’ve heard every question already. The lie-detector test happened at an earlier date. They can change their answer at any time if they feel that, in the first test, they answered incorrectly. And they can stop at any time. With all those mechanisms in place, they really are driving the bus.

“But that doesn’t stop them from driving it off a cliff sometimes.”

Do you like your mother-in-law?

Actually, some people have already backed out because they got squeamish.

“There are times during the casting process,” Schultz says, “where people will say, ‘I want to come on, but please don’t ask me any questions about my mother.’ We tell them straight away, we make no promises. If you’re agreeing to come on this show, you’re agreeing to accept whatever questions come your way.

“We had one woman back out after she took her first polygraph exam. This was an individual who I called up on the phone to see if I could convince her to come back on the show and she said to me, ‘I could never come on the show and answer those questions. You don’t understand. My parents have been divorced for three years and no one in my family knows!’

“Well, a person like that, absolutely she can’t come on the show. She is living a life that is so full of pretense that this show would have that glass case that she lives in come crashing down around her.”

She knew what we’ve already stated: Some questions should never be answered truthfully.

Having said this, Schultz believes this provocative game show premise has the potential to enrich every viewer’s life.

“Part of the creation of this show stems from the fact that I believe we’ve become a nation of liars, that we’ve become a world of liars, that it is so difficult to get the truth from anybody nowadays,” he says. “We’re being spun up one side and down the other. We just are living in a pile of beans.

“And it is my fervent desire that this show starts to breathe a dialogue about the truth. The truth does matter. The truth really can set us free. I think that many of the problems that exist in this world can be solved if we become aware that there is something called the truth and if we then start dealing with the hard realities of the truth and start to clean up our lives and clean up our world and clean up everything about what we’re doing.”

Nice idea. I’m game.

As long as I don’t have to come clean about my Internet porn addiction.