Even reality TV producers turn some ideas down

Let's see. An 8,000- pound elephant squares off against a team of little people to see who can move a jumbo jet 75 feet the fastest. A group of strangers line up to march down the aisle to marry a partner randomly picked by bunch of other strangers. Another group of near-strangers, in a fierce match for a million bucks, gobble down animal body parts even the butcher doesn't like to talk about.

Now, if you haven't been glued to your TV set for the past few weeks, you could be forgiven for thinking that this list is actually a bunch of ideas for TV shows that were rejected by programming executives because they sink too low just to grab a few ratings points.

You would be wrong, of course. These are all shows that have aired or will air soon.

But it's hard not to wonder, with such fare actually making it to air, is there anything, any idea at all, that these ratings-hungry network execs are turning down? The answer, is yes. For now.

"We turned down full frontal nudity on 'Dog Eat Dog,' " says Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment. The network chief who has challenged the boundaries of contestants' palettes on "Fear Factor," says that after the < episode with the offensive exposure crossed his desk, he sent it back for reworking. It aired, he adds, with discreet shielding of the nudity.

Noble sentiment, says media pundit Robert Thompson, but perhaps not necessary. "What we like to think of as the human spirit being corrupted by television," he says, "is actually some of the baser sides of the human spirit that have always been with us, just being laid bare by television." Just read the Old Testament or check out an old P.T. Barnum Circus lineup, he says, if you want confirmation of unsavory behavior that's been on display for millenniums.

In some ways, he says, it's about time for TV to broaden its repertoire. "Television has managed to ignore real love and death, the biggest human conditions we have." Allowing people to improvise within defined parameters is a genre that has only begun to reveal its real potential, he adds.

The Fox Network is one of the early pioneers to explore the love side of Professor Thompson's maxim. Who knew how much entertainment value there was in watching people break the biblical taboo against coveting your neighbor's significant other ("Temptation Island")? Nonethe-less, says entertainment president Gail Berman, there are some shows she won't do.

She now hears so many pitches for unscripted shows that the ideas can be loosely grouped into categories, one of them being objects falling from space. "You wouldn't believe what a big category that is and how many hundreds of ideas come to us every day. People falling out of planes; off buildings, mountains - amazing, really," she says.

In addition, she says, "we debuted the format," and have a sense of responsibility about where it goes. In a new program such as "Man Versus Beast," the show in which a team of little people race an elephant to tug an aircraft across a tarmac [an event that, when we last checked, has yet to be registered as an Olympic sport], she notes Fox took precautions over possible sensitivities.

"We feel a responsibility to let people know that the animals have all been handled responsibly," she says.

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