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Colombia Reality Gameshow Goes Off Air
Lie Detector Reality Gameshow Goes Off the Air in Colombia
October 09, 2007: 05:56 PM EST

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - The hit Colombian TV game show "Nothing But the Truth" is no more.
The show, in which contestants submitting to a lie-detector test must truthfully answer 21 increasingly invasive questions to win $50,000, has been canceled by Caracol Television after a contestant admitted on air to hiring a hit man to kill her husband. Tuesday was the show's final day.

However a U.S version called "Moment of the Truth" is expected to be launched on the Fox network in the coming months along with spin-offs in England, Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain, according to Howard Schultz, the Los Angeles-based creator of the show.

The Colombian show has scored high ratings normally reserved for popular telenovelas. It's also spurred a boom in polygraph usage among private companies, which use lie detector tests to screen employees and protect themselves from infiltration by Colombia's well-organized mafias.

On the show, dollar-desperate contestants confess, before a studio audience packed with unsuspecting loved ones, everything from extramarital affairs to drug smuggling and homosexual prostitution.

But the show also generated sharp rebukes from polygraph examiners in the United States, family-values groups, and legal experts who say the truth-telling spectacle is tantamount to a modern-day Roman Circus and sanctions criminal behavior. Complaints of indecency have also poured in to Colombia's national television commission.

The episode that sealed the show's fate was broadcast Oct. 2, when Rosa Maria Solano walked home with $25,000 after admitting she had hired a hit man to rub out her husband.

"The crime couldn't be carried out because the hit man tipped off my husband and he ran away forever _ God save me," said Solano after her shocking revelation.

In the face of negative public reaction to the show, and the threat of legal action against Caracol's producers for being after-the-fact accessories to crime, the network recoiled.

"We've reached the conclusion that the content of some of the interviews, for being excessively cruel, don't conform with what Caracol has always promoted," Caracol said in a statement last week announcing it would not bring the show back for a second season.

Schultz, the creator of such reality TV hits as MTV's "Next" and ABC's "Extreme Makeover, said he was unfamiliar with the controversial episode in Colombia but did not fear it would slow the show's worldwide rollout.

"We're very careful about the questions we ask and would never sanction any criminal behavior," he said.