This time, they'd gone too far

photo: BuzzSugar

Here's the throwaway line that caught my interest:

The Colombian version was canceled in October after a woman confessed on the show that she had hired someone to kill her husband.

So ends a late paragraph in Alessandra Stanley's review of "The Moment of Truth," a Fox reality-TV offering this season. The show's basic premise is to ask increasingly intimate questions and reward truthful answers with cash. Half the fun is in watching the contestant squirm, the other half is in watching his family seethe. Classy.

According to Stanley, the Fox version is expected to be "quite tame" compared to adaptations abroad. Digging a little with friends in TV down in Colombia, I found that it isn't exactly true to say the show was canceled after the hired-killer confession. Instead, the show's demise seems to be due to a crusader named Santiago Salah, a Colombian lawyer who published high-holy op-eds in the daily El Tiempo, lashing out against the gameshow as morally reprehensible. If you speak Spanish, check out this Telemundo report.

Still, there's a charm to this whole mess. Colombian morality, their twisted sense of Catholic guilt and truth, their ability to take distraction to professional heights, and then Fox television glomming on to things of a piece. It wasn't long after the October end to "Nada mas que la verdad" that Colombia turned its attentions to an equally compelling reality show, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez negotiated with Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the FARC, to have two long-held, high-profile hostages released.

So what, exactly, is going too far in Colombia? Let Fox show us.