If you’re one of those people who like reading credits at the end of movies or television shows (And boy, aren’t you in a bind in this era of scrunched-up credits at the end of CBS and NBC shows?), then you would have been intrigued by what you read at the end of the new Fox-TV relationships show “Liars”:
“Polygraph results are not always completely accurate. The polygraph examinations depicted are reenactments of actual examinations previously given. Some of the visual effects are for dramatic effect only. Actual examinations are given in a quiet setting, without distractions, with only the examiner and subject present.”
Here you’ve got a show about one person trying to find out if the other is lying about a particular instance, with the person in question being strapped into a chair and hooked up to a lie detector. If they are telling the truth, a bright green light flashes behind them. If they’re lying, that light shines red. Quasi-celebrity judges (ex-Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates? Joey Buttafuoco?) ask pointed questions before giving their own individual verdicts.
But if the disclaimer is true, doesn’t that mean the principals already know what the outcome is going to be? And if that’s the case, what’s the point of all the dramatic buildup for something where the outcome is already known?
Leave it to host Fran Solomita to come to our rescue.
“A polygraph takes an hour-15 minutes to an hour-and-a-half, because they have to measure your anxiety level. . .and they then do the test before you come on. And then when you come on, it’s a re-enactment of the results. So basically the show and the set and the chair and the colors, that’s all for TV.
“But the results aren’t revealed. Nobody knows them, I don’t even know them. The producers are the only ones that know this. The people on the show don’t know.”
Well, that explains a lot. And Solomita wouldn’t have it any other way.
“That’s the one dramatic, human drama element of the show and the suspense for everyone involved,” said Solomita over lunch one day while in Chicago to promote “Liars,” which is on weeknights at midnight on WFLD-Ch. 32.
“That’s why it’s fun for me, too. Because then you don’t know what you’re going to deal with, you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
What has happened in past episodes is one woman busted a male friend who claimed he wasn’t a stripper; one man was cleared in the eyes of his girlfriend, who swore he had an affair with a woman when those two were away playing camp counselors; and one woman was caught lying to her husband that she never spent time as a phone-sex operator.
“Liars” is in the middle of a 13 week run, but with expectations running mostly high in Chicago and the six other text markets the show is in, Fox might continue it past that.
Since Solomita has been doing this for a while now, maybe he can clear something else up for us: What is it about these people who want to risk humiliating themselves by revealing their personal, intimate problems in front of millions of people?
Solomita, who’s in his 30s came up with a few reasons. For one thing, with his show “people think they can actually beat the lie detector, and maybe some of them do. There is a 5 percent chance (the machine is 95 percent accurate).”
There’s also what Solomita called a “big confessional swing going on in talk shows and in life these days,” where people want to come clean nationally with something they’ve done.
But it also might be a case of wanting that fame that TV can give. “Everybody wants to be famous for that 15 minutes,” Solomita said. “And our segments are exactly 15 minutes.”
– Where’s the remote: One of the coolest episodes of “The X-Files” is coming on Tuesday at 7 p.m. on WFLD-Ch. 32. It’s a repeat of a two-part segment (both parts are running back-to-back Tuesday) where FBI special agent Fox Mulder’s (David Duchovny) missing sister makes an appearance. As long-time “X-Files” fans know, Mulder’s younger sister was abducted by aliens when they were kids, and this is an obsession which launched Mulder on his crusade to discover whether “the truth is out there.”
– Paula DeVicq, who plays Kirsten on Fox’s great family drama “Party of Five,” shows up in “Wounded Heart,” a USA Pictures Original movie which airs on the USA cable network Wednesday at 8 p.m. And this is a romantic drama, not one of the network’s notorious “Women in Peril Theatre,” where DeVicq is being chased/harassed/abused.