11/13/00

There's a great new show on MTV. Initially, Jackass looks like a pale imitation of The Tom Green Show. There are plenty of man-on-the-street/get-the-reaction-of-surprised-onlookers bits, although they're shot on low-grade home video and soundtracked with the incessant giggling of the stoner holding the camera. Low-budg aesthetics aside, Jackass taps into something far more sinister than anything Green produced: the queasy feeling that someone is about to be seriously injured. This undercurrent shifts Jackass from a cable-TV curiosity to an addictive must-see show. MTV used to stand for Music Television. Now, it's clearly Mortality Television. The network that built itself on Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper's wrestling buddies has set its sights on the ultimate sweeps-week gimmick: killing a teenager on the air. From Jackass to Road Rules to Fear, Viacom's outlet to the lucrative 18-34 demographic has recently become obsessed with killing off the hip kids they use to create shows... and we love it.

The trend toward death began several years ago with The Real World: Los Angeles. Following a ho-hum experiment in New York, wherein diametrically opposed 18-somethings were locked in a mansion to "see what happens," the Los Angeles cast included an angry black guy and a country singer in [boots]. Naturally, it took only two episodes before the two nearly came to blows. This incident sparked the must-kill trend, and the network hasn't been the same since.

Road Rules was the next step toward creating an accidental death scenario. Not satisfied with the slow-brewing aggravation that grows in housebound roommates over time, MTV jacked The Real World by moving the kids from a mansion to a Winnebago, and forcing them to jump off tall things instead of argue over who failed to wash the dishes. The chances of death were multiplied immediately, as close quarters fueled conflicts, and challenge after challenge tested the resolve of MTV's insurance company. Still, no one was killed. The network strived to work harder.

Last year, MTV came close enough to taste it. Real World/Road Rules Challenge 2000 took surviving cast members of the network's two reality TV shows and put them into a special 10-week series of challenges. The channel seemed to have its sights set on Amaya, the whiny [girl] from The Real World: Hawaii. Episodes of Challenge 2000 featured Amaya in a demolition derby car that accidentally filled with smoke and, in the season finale of all season finales, dropped her out of a plane with a parachute that wasn't 100%. MTV execs were stunned to find that Amaya survived her high-speed landing, and vowed to do better.

This year, MTV has picked up two new shows that have the potential to kill off a preselected teen. Fear sends kids into "haunted" locales and forces them into pitch-blackness to (again) "see what happens" when their imaginations get cranking. So far, none of the contestants have had weak enough tickers to croak outright, but plenty of episodes show people screaming bloody murder while running down unlit corridors. Perhaps, if they would throw in an axe murderer, the show might be more effective.

And then there's Jackass. The gang of nitwits behind this show delights in near-death experiences. They think nothing of riding a scooter down a steep rocky hill, then laughing hysterically as the helmeted rider inevitably falls and tumbles out of control down the second half of the embankment. Better, if the would-be stuntman isn't hurt in the first take, they'll try again... and again... and again. What makes Jackass so unbelievably riveting is the notion that the participants don't take the time to consider the consequen