The Smoking Gun Takes a Shot At Dumb Felons

Usually these kinds of superlative shows -- "World's Fiercest Muskrat Attacks," "World's Shockingest Grammatical Errors" -- are superlatively awful. They're the bottom-of-the-cable-TV barrel shows designed for both couch carrots so lazy and glazed over that they can't bother to change the channel with the remote and for us-upwardly mobile viewers who, while channel surfing, just happen to stop for a second, only a second, to check out what the hell's going on in that police chase. Then suddenly, it's six hours later, and we too have grown into couch carrots with eyes glazed over and have become too lazy to change the channel.

It's these shows, these "World's Worst Shows," that are turning a nation of TV vieweres into rutabagas. And they can't actually get any better because then they'd have to be renamed the "World's Almost Worst, But Somewhat Intellectually Stimulating Or At Least Not So Intelligence-Stunting Pest Control Accidents."

Or so I thought. With truTV's (formerly CourtTV) The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest (Thursdays, 9pm) they may have indeed improved upon the formula.

By using TheSmokingGun.com, they earn the show at least a little credibility. That site's been a mainstay bookmark for the Web-surfing world, mostly because the muckraking, public-information-request filers at The Smoking Gun are always the first to post embarrassing celebrity mugshots and legal filings. There was Nick Nolte's Coolio-haired mugshot and, of course, Bill O'Reilly's falafeloofah sexual-harassment suit. Think of the water-cooler implications. Tomorrow, when Joe from sales asks what you did last night, which answer is going to sound better: "I scoped out TheSmokingGun.com's new show," or "Um...errr...Me and a bag of Cheetos got caught up in 'World's Funniest Ice Cream Headaches.'"

Like all its genre brethren, the show is mostly a pastiche of security cam and police cruiser footage catching, you guessed it, criminals doing dumb, dumb things. But unlike most of its genre brethren, they've filtered out all the "Meh, that wasn't so ridiculous!" videos. They've collected the cream of the crop. For example, here's "Geronimo" and the "roly-poly" cops:

TheSmokingGun.com fans looking for celebrity crimes caught on tape will be mostly disappointed; that's just not what this show is about. But to quench that thirst, the producers have collected a panel of former celebrity arrestees (knee-bashing ice skater Tonya Harding, transvestite-beating former The Partridge Family star Danny Bonaduce, and ex-drug addict and former child-star Leif Garrett) to provide tongue-in-cheek critiques of the criminal idiocy. Combined with psychologists, private investigators, defense lawyers and comedians, the stars create a Best Week Ever feel.

And that's what separates this new show from the pack. It's still crap TV, sure, but like Best Week Ever, it is the socially acceptable equivalent of Entertainment Tonight. With The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbes you don't have to be shameless to watch without being ashamed.

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