IT’S not the premise of “Murder,” Spike TV’s new game show, that’s so heinous. It’s the execution.
The good idea behind the bad game is simple: Solve a murder. The team that gets it right wins. The bad part is that these teams are playing a game based around actual, horrid, brutal and unspeakably cruel deaths.
Each week, a few beefy men and willowy-yet-stacked blondes are divided into two teams.
Their mission? Solve an inhuman real murder by pretending to be CSI sleuths.
Think “The Apprentice,” but instead of car washes, there are photos of real corpses with their faces blown off.
Instead of the Trump penthouse, there are re-created scenes where actual murders took place, complete with recreated mutilated corpses with their faces ripped away by gunshot blasts.
Then there are all those brain-matter-soaked walls, sheets, beds – all meticulously re-created for the benefit of the gamers.
Good, except doesn’t anyone care that these murder victims were once real people? People who once had parents and children, people who wanted to achieve something in life only to have it brutally stolen by violence?
Since the real-life victims are now real dead victims, it’s impossible to know whether they would have liked their last terrifying moments to have been turned into a TV game show. I assume the answer would be “no.”
But then again, people will do anything to be on or involved in TV.
It’s only fitting that the producers, Bunim-Murray, would come up with this, the ultimate reality-game show – they are, after all, the creators of reality TV. My objection to their latest leap is that the murders are re-created in disgusting and gory detail, which makes the victims’ deaths a joke.
If the show just gave the contestants the facts – just the facts, ma’am – and let them solve the murders, it could have been more palatable.
This is not to say the re-creation of the cases isn’t interesting. You will find yourself playing amateur detective and trying to solve the crimes, too.
But what I can’t get past, even though I’m a huge fan of true-crime books and movies, is that in that genre, victims are respected. Here, they’re props for fun.
“Murder” is hosted by Detective Tommy Le Noir, a 27-year veteran Arlington, Texas, cop, who should know better, since he’s experienced firsthand the ruination that murder brings on families.
Yeah, he’ll get ragged by former colleagues, but in this culture, being on TV and, better yet, being a game-show host, may just impress them.
Or sicken them. To death.