Television: Virtuous Reality

With the debuts this week of NBC's Darwinian, trash-talking quiz show The Weakest Link and UPN's blind-dates-in-bondage series Chains of Love, you can expect to hear cries that TV has finally gone too far. (Again!) But reality-TV critics and fans alike fail to see that the shows are really tiny morality plays. Underneath the sleaze are sermons illustrating simple, school-primer virtues. You may watch for the bikinis and backstabbing, but everything you need to know about life you can learn from reality.

COMMUNITY

Can the very rules of a game make it immoral? Susan Sarandon thinks so. The statement-minded actress condescended to guest-star on NBC's Friends because, she said, its rival Survivor is a game that "[rewards] behavior that shouldn't be rewarded." Unlike the more wholesome chess (which rewards sacrificing the weak to protect the important) or Monopoly (which rewards price gouging)? Hard fought as it is--as in pretty much any game, there's only one winner--Survivor is also based on social precepts most people try to teach their toddlers. Play well with others: Survivor is not kind to loners, like this season's Kel and Debb. Share your goodies: when Colby brought back chunks of an endangered coral reef for his tribe mates after winning a day trip, the calculated baksheesh bolstered his position. Don't be bossy: Jerri's pushiness ultimately led to her tribal alliance's surprise turn against her. Indeed, despite the conventional line that the game is all about treachery, the alliances on both seasons of the show have more often than not held together--so much so that the producers have had to edit creatively to create suspense. If the players won't play tricks, the camera has to.

COMMUNICATION

We all laughed last year when NBC signed Chains of Love--in which a "picker," male or female, is chained to four "dates" over four days--and called it a "relationship show." (NBC later took the high road and aired the XFL instead.) Turns out the description was accurate. The surprising thing about Chains (UPN, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.) is not the PG-rated sex play (the chainees wear chaste bathing suits even in a hot tub) but the discovery that even reality-TV exhibitionists have thoroughly internalized the chatty psychobabble of relationship gurus. In the debut, picker Andy spends less time trying to score than prattling about his dates' "honesty," "self-esteem" and "defensiveness." If you were expecting chained heat, you will discover something more like Big Brother (whose makers co-produce Chains), which promised scandal but delivered group therapy.

FIDELITY