Moment of Tooth

The polygraph (or 'lie detector') doesn't work. It's slightly better than chance (which can be attributed to people's belief that it works) and has a significant number of both false positives (truth-tellers labeled liars) and false negatives (liars who get away with it): at least six notorious spies, such as Aldrich Ames, have repeatedly passed while engaged in spying.

But even those who insist that it does work know that it requires special conditions. (I've had to take one quite a few times in my career.) You have to be physically comfortable, they turn you so you can't see the operator, you're told to fix your attention on a point on the wall, the questions have to be focused and clearly understood (operators generally go over the questions with you beforehand), and so on.

So, this new Fox 'reality' show, "The Moment of Truth" - I just saw an ad for it as I channel-surfed - where people are sitting in some game-show style of chair in the middle of a studio audience being asked bizarre questions - apparently some of them of the purely hypothetical variety, not "have you..." but "would you..." - with people yelling at them? Even if polygraphs worked, this isn't the way they work.

This is a very Fox show, stupid, cruel, exploitative, and voyeuristic, designed merely to humiliate people in front of an audience howling for blood.

It'll probably do really well.