NY Times: Pranksters Who Spare No Punches- Mayim Bialik & Peter Funt on TV Land’s ‘Candid Camera’ paired well

Reposted 24 Oct 2014 1:05 PM PT

Original Article Posted 20 Oct 2014 by The New York Times and published in print 21 Oct 2014

 

You can gauge the health of a civilization by its hidden-camera television shows. Using that barometer, our society will decline noticeably on Tuesday night, and by Friday, it will have gone completely to heck.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, as part of a Halloween-theme stretch of programming, ABC Family is showing two installments of a special called “Freak Out,” a prank show with a robust special-effects budget and a mean streak.

The gimmick is that a friend or relative who wants to get back at someone for a minor offense arranges the prank, which is captured by hidden cameras. Some of the gags are pretty funny and well executed, especially one in which a hair-salon treatment turns catastrophic. (Key line of dialogue, spoken by way of explanation to the horrified target: “There was an accident earlier in the supply closet.”)

But others are a little darker than a good prank ought to be. One involves an apparent electrocution; another, a stalker. Yes, these bits might amuse the teenagers who presumably make up a significant part of ABC Family’s audience; their parents, though, might put them in the same class as fraternity hazing. As for the payback angle, the punishment often doesn’t match the crime. On this show, the penalty for leaving hair in the bathroom sink is to be terrorized.

Just how far this show ups the prank ante is particularly clear to anyone who watched the reboot of “Candid Camera” that TV Land broadcast in August and September. It was an update of the Allen Funt show from the early days of television, but more or less as gentle as the initial years of the original series were. A waitress samples the food of startled restaurant guests. Residents of Queens are brought new recycling bins: eight full-size trash cans, each a different color. (Brown: poultry waste. Violet: toxic waste.) Peter Funt (Allen’s son) and Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory” paired rather well to sell the good-natured, hostility-free clips.

From harmless to unsettling to, on Friday night, crassness with a cucumber. “Deal With It” begins a new season on TBS that night. In the show, an unknowing victim reacts as a companion follows bizarre instructions being relayed by the hosts through an earpiece. In the season premiere, a mother and daughter are at a restaurant when the mother — following the earpiece input — starts making rather graphic sexual remarks and then asks the waiter to bring a particular vegetable so it can be used as a visual aid.

Sigh. But maybe civilization isn’t so much declining as merely making its periodic return to the lowest common denominator. Allen Funt, you’ll recall, had the wholesome “Candid Camera,” yet he also made the scandalous hidden-camera film “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?,” way back in 1970.