scare tactics
February 17, 2003
Zap2it | TV: NEWS: Sci Fi's 'Scare Tactics' Faces Lawsuit: A hidden-camera show called "Scare Tactics," scheduled to premiere in the spring on the Sci Fi Channel, is facing a lawsuit. [...] A Los Angeles woman named Kara Blanc is suing the cable channel, "Scare Tactics" creators Scott Hallock and Kevin Healey and two actors who took part in the stunt in which Blanc was unwittingly involved, the Los Angeles Times reports. Blanc claims she suffered physical and psychological trauma as the result of witnessing a violent encounter with a "space alien" -- one of the performers on the show -- that she believed to be real.
On the one hand ... this lawsuit looks vaguely bogus, based on the admittedly quite limited information in the Zap2It article.
On the other hand .... I kind of hope that SciFi loses.
See, thing is, I've never entirely gotten the concept of this sort of entertainment. Not beyond a very stringent limit, anyway. The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? Not funny. Mind, it's not very good, but mostly, it's just not funny. Candid Camera, in its various incarnations? Eh. Whatever.
It's just never seemed exceptionally amusing to me to put people into odd situations so that we can laugh at the fact that we know something that they don't, so that we can feel terribly superior.
But you know ... if this type of show is going to go down -- and it really should -- you kind of hope it would be on something more meaningful than a lawsuit essentially alleging, "I was taumatized by faux aliens!"
Posted by iain at 10:00 PM | Comments (13)