Contestants line up for verbal abuse from tiresome faux-dominatrix Anne Robinson on "Weakest Link." Overwhelmingly young, white and amped masochists undergo torture for fun and profit on "Fear Factor." The gullible, the clueless and the foreign are the butt of nasty pranks on "Spy TV." A latecomer to the reality party, NBC is now the ratings belle of the summer ball, with "Weakest Link" regularly placing in the Nielsen Top 10 and "Fear Factor" and "Spy TV" in the Top 20.

NBC stands for "Nothing but Cruelty," goes the joke, but the Peacock Network is not complaining. NBC's new president of entertainment, Jeff Zucker, took office with a twofold mission: 1) Find the next "Survivor" or "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," and 2) reel in younger viewers. He hasn't quite succeeded on the former. "Weakest Link" still trails "Millionaire" in the ratings, and its five minutes as a "Survivor"-style cultural phenomenon are long gone. ("G'bye," indeed.)

But Zucker's reality shows have managed to strike the fancy of 18-to-34-year-old viewers. These are the viewers who made the globe-hopping mystery hunt "The Mole" a modest demographic hit for ABC, who did the same for Fox's skanky "Temptation Island" and who are no strangers to MTV's seminal reality shows "The Real World," "Road Rules," "The Tom Green Show" and "Jackass." Thanks to shock shows like "Fear Factor" and "Spy TV," NBC now outscores the other broadcast networks with viewers in this advertiser-coveted demographic group. NBC has already ordered more episodes of "Fear Factor" and "Spy TV" (both shows, by the way, are productions of Endemol, which gave us "Big Brother"); they'll most likely be held in reserve to air next year as midseason replacements.

TV critics have pretty much uniformly trashed "Fear Factor" and "Spy TV" -- a sure sign that Zucker's gambit is a success. Critics aren't in tune with the kind of TV that young adults want to watch, goes the NBC party line. "There is a whole generational thing going on in TV. This group has grown up with MTV and ESPN and the X Games. They are not as interested in watching 'ER' or traditional situational comedies," Zucker recently told Entertainment Weekly.

	Fear Factor (8 p.m. Mondays, NBC) Spy TV (8 p.m. Tuesdays and 8:30 p.m. Thursdays, NBC) Print story E-mail story

So what are 18-to-34-year-olds interested in watching, according to the network gurus? Stunts, gross-outs and the humiliation of "real people" just like themselves. But when you think about it, this isn't so new. Spying and schadenfreude have been around since the dawn of reality programming -- from "Candid Camera" to "The Newlywed Game" to "That's Incredible!" to "Cops," your grandparents and parents liked to watch, too.

Maybe the issue isn't that TV is so much cruder and harsher than it used to be, but that we are. Yes, TV is responsible for lowering the bar of cultural acceptability, and right now, it's really low. But you can't blame the reality TV boom entirely for the depressing glimpse into the American character it provides. We are, it seems, a nation of bored, ill-educated, vacuous, voyeuristic, attention-craving chuckleheads, and how we got that way is a million-dollar question I'd need to use all my lifelines to answer.

I am not immune; I got hooked on "Survivor." But then, I'm a traditionalist at heart, and "Survivor" simply found a compelling new way to tell a dramatic, linear story. "Fear Factor," however, has no such storytelling gifts. Each episode of "Fear Factor" introduces a new group of six players. Each group of players looks exactly like the last week's group of players (three men, three women, one of whom in each gender group is always African-American). The players are required to perform three punishing, yet carefully supervised, "extreme stunts"; if they refuse or are injured during a stunt, they are eliminated. The winner gets $50,000. Most of the show consists of five people standing around watching someone else do something stupid. Affable host Joe Rogan, king of the chuckleheads, sidles up to contestants and encourages them to mess with one another's heads and "strategize," but the players haven't figured out how to strategize in a "game" like this beyond "OK, I'm going to try not to die during this next stunt."

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