First off, this is about a TV show, but I’m more concerned with the legal end of it, so I believe it belongs here in GQ.
Tonight a new show is premiering called Scare Tactics. The premise of the show is that it’s a hidden camera show, except they really freak their victims out.
My question is how do they get away with this? I mean, they really freak these people out, why aren’t they afraid of being sued. I’ve seen the show, the situations they put these people in would be very frightening if I weren’t sitting on the couch laughing my ass off. And to see the reactions of these people, you can see how scared the victims are.
So why aren’t the producers afraid of being sued by people who just don’t get the sense of humour?
More seriously, this sort of matter would be ripe for punitive damages so as to reduce the probability of the producers averaging the occasional damage award against the income from the shows that did not lead to damages.
After reading the article cited above, what I’m wondering is how it would be handled if the woman (the plaintiff) had, instead of running from the alien, defended herself or tried to protect her friends, and injured or even killed the person in the costume. She could have had a gun in her purse and used it.
Certainly if she believed her friends were being killed, then that would justify the use of deadly force, right? Think about how traumatic it would be for her after she found out it was staged! (Not to mention for everybody else as well.)
I really think they’ve stepped over the line with this show.
In another thread someone argued that the whole thing the fake (the victims are actors in on it too) because of the camera angles.
Although I don’t find the camera angle argument isn’t convincing, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were fake because of the legal issues. This would of course mean the lawsuit already mentioned in this thread is fake too, which would likely be against to law (wasting the court system’s resources). So I really don’t know.
I mentioned in another thread that this show will be funny up until the moment some relative viewing the simulated injury or death of a participant drops dead from a heart attack. After that, there will litigation up the wazoo and little else. Whoever thought this up needs some parking lot therapy in the worst way. Turning the distress and horror of people watching endangered loved ones into entertainment is lower than a snake’s belly full of buckshot.