Dial File — Steve Bornfeld: ‘Multi’ mess might be multi-blessing

Friday, Feb. 25, 2000 | 9:03 a.m.

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His television column appears Fridays. Reach him at steveb@vegas.com or 259-4081.

Maybe it was -- GASP! -- a good thing.

Maybe "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" did us a huge favor: the proverbial blessing in disguise -- in this case, an ingenious disguise.

Maybe this demeaning debacle -- tacky TV-arranged marriage yields feet-of-clay-groom, disenchanted bride, quickie annulment and snickering public -- has finally sent TV spinning, nose-diving, plummeting, crash-landing into the gutter in a ball of flames.

Maybe there is nowhere to go from here but up. The phoenix has no choice but to rise.

Or maybe network TV is revealing itself as a bottomless pit of pathetic spectacle and this was just one more sorry sight along the endless trip down.

Please let the former be true. But fear the latter.

After all, if you believe in prophecy -- particularly that of mad prophet Paddy Chayefsky and his prophetic movie "Network" (remember the show starring the black militants, the on-air murder of Howard Beale, newsman William Holden telling programmer Faye Dunaway, "you're madness"?) -- you've got to have your doubts. Just consider how the freaky fiction of that landmark work edges ever closer to the freaky reality of network television.

But before further condemnation of TV is Going to Hell, Chapter 6,847, a few facts:

Now everyone's got buyer's remorse. Well, them's the breaks, kids. Hard to stand in the path of a charging elephant and then profess shock at being flattened.

Tasteless TV is nothing new. Even tasteless TV blown into scandalous proportions that commands media clucking like we've seen all week is nothing new. It's got a proudly perverse history, from Geraldo's busted beak courtesy of a flying chair and energetic skinheads to the "Jenny Jones Show" same-sex-crush murder case to the uproar over whether the fights on "The Jerry Springer Show" were staged. (Of course we'd all feel much better about ourselves if the brawls were genuine, right?)

But have we finally bottomed out with the "Multimillionaire" mess?

Quite possibly. It sure feels that way, as if we've crossed the international Enough! line.

Although the Jenny Jones episode was unquestionably the more catastrophic -- straight guy feels humiliated on national TV when gay guy declares his crush on him, so straight guy later murders gay guy -- the culpability ultimately belonged to the murderer, even if the show was grossly irresponsible (to the tune of a $25 million judgment) in setting up the scenario in which a tragedy could occur.

A key point, however: "The Jenny Jones Show" did not throw the two together after the cameras stopped rolling.

By contrast -- and despite the embarrassment and humiliation triggered by it -- the "Multimillionaire" monstrosity actually feels like we've dodged a bullet. Here was a show that obviously didn't do enough of a background check on its moneybags bachelor who, it is alleged by his ex-fiancee, is, at worst, an abuser (which he denies) and, at best, a hothead (which he sort of admits).

As a result, a TV show threw a young woman -- the bride he chose out of 50 "contestants" -- into a potentially dangerous situation (marriage to a man she knew nothing about and what turned out to be a strained, celibate, shortened "honeymoon"). Given what has since been learned about the groom, she could have conceivably suffered much more than just national embarrassment. And Fox could have suffered legal liability.

(Granted, you could make the same argument in principle about "The Dating Game" a few decades back, but the ensuing dates were always chaperoned. If the parties involved wanted to take it further than that first date after getting a sense of each other, they were on their own.)

At the height of this game show/reality programming juggernaut, "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" stopped us dead and forced us to take a good, long look at what we, via ratings, actually encourage. That scrutiny -- nationwide, and not just by carping critics -- was long overdue.

So what happens now? As noted here last week, more people-in-contrived-situations shows, cribbed from European television, are on the way ("Survivor" -- people thrown together on a remote island vote each other off one by one; "Big Brother" -- people thrown together in a house monitored by constant surveillance and totally devoid of privacy vote each other out one by one).

Will the "Multimillionaire" morass actually temper -- and cause programmers to re-think -- similar game show extremes?

The odds are good, at least in the short term.

And if not in the long term? Well, we as viewers have the ultimate power -- a power that could begin with the words of a mad prophet: "I'm as mad as hell ..."

Croon a Tune: The pounding surf. The pounding beat. The pounding that the copper caper series did on the ratings from 1968-80. Yes, last week's theme was the classic "Hawaii Five-O."

Tune Crooners who solved the case and would've made Steve McGarrett proud were: Linda Noel, Dollie Ferguson, Mary Dowling, Ann Kaiser, Tony Varchetto, Debra "that's too easy for anyone over 35" Sullivan, Ali Rose, Rich "didn't the Ventures do that back when we were kids?" Kackstetter, Stanley Czapla, Alex "you can book that, Dan-O" Jeanos, Penelope Wells, Renee "too easy" Savicki, Joe Lacy and Peter Green.

Too easy, huh? Let's try a tougher tune to croon by phoning 259-4012.

I may be easy, but I'm not, well, that easy.

Closing Credits: On Saturday at 10 a.m. Cox Communications will host local auditions at Henderson's Galleria at Sunset mall for a family to appear on "Double Dare 2000," the Nickelodeon game show known for covering contestants with green slime.

If that's un-appetizing, just think of it as "Who Wants to Be a Slimeball."

Then -- if you dare to dream -- fantasize about meeting your beloved on "Who Wants to Marry a Slimeball."