"How low can you go?" For most folks, the question refers to prices on certain consumer goods. A Yahoo search turned more than 97,000 uses of that phrase and, for as long as I cared to click, the phrase was usually a sales pitch of sorts.

But the phrase carries other meanings. It can, for those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, be a cri d' coeur, a cry that asks "have we hit bottom yet or is there still a ways to go before our moral convictions — or, to be precise, the lack thereof — reach their logical terminus?"

It's a question that occurred to some people last spring when the Fox television network set new standards for tasteless and morally empty programming with "Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millionaire?" On that special, 50 single women competed for the hand of an alleged multi-millionaire.

Fox received no end of grief for its cavalier treatment of marriage. But never underestimate Newscorp's lack of shame. If you thought Fox learned its lesson and decided to stick to car crashes, animal attacks and cops busting yet another clueless drug dealer, you were wrong. Fox's newest hit show, "Temptation Island," shows there's still plenty of bottom to be explored.

"Temptation Island" is Fox's attempt to cash in on the "reality television" craze started by "Survivor." For those of you who spent last summer digging for fossils in the Sahel, or who were otherwise occupied, "Survivor" taught television executives that Americans, and everyone else, for that matter, will watch other people and call it entertainment.

The formula is simple: take a group of strangers, place them in a contrived situation with something at stake, and turn on the cameras. The relationships and interactions between the participants become the basis for entertainment. If it works, it's golden. You get ER-like ratings without spending $22 million per episode. But, in order for it to work, the relationships and interactions have to cohere into a narrative — a story complete with characters and a plot that holds the audience's interest. Without it, you have "Big Brother," which, as my friend Douglas put it, conclusively proved that while Americans will watch other people, they will not watch them doing their laundry.

Not taking any chances, Fox and company gave "Temptation Island" a built-in story. Not the quest for money, but something more basic: the struggle against temptation.

Fox put 24, as Salon.com describes them: "babealicious gals" and "hunkarific guys," on an island. But unlike other "reality" shows, the goal isn't for the contestants to merely outlast each other, it's for the show's contestants to seduce each other. What puts the "temptation" in "Temptation Island" are the four couples among the contestants. Fox characterizes these couples as "committed" but at a "crossroads in their relationship." (What does that mean? As best as I can tell, it means they purport to "care" about one another, but are open to the possibility of seduction and humiliating the other.)

Upon their arrival on the island, the man and woman are separated from one another. For the next two weeks, they have no contact with each other. What will they be doing? As Fox puts it, playing "physical and relationship games." with a group of scantily-clad singles.

By "games," Fox means "deliver us into temptation." Each partner will go out on a series of dates — including an all-nighter in a private cabin. Actually, it's not really private. If somebody succumbs to temptation, the audience will hear, if not see, what's happening. Then, at the end of the two weeks, each person must decide whether to remain with the person they came with, or leave them for someone they met on "Temptation Island."

If the premise isn't enough to draw the audience in, there's always voyeurism. Contestants had to agree to allow the producers to capture almost every waking moment — especially what Fox calls the "tantalizing" ones. They also must "feel comfortable appearing on national television in a bathing suit and similar attire."

The formula has paid off handsomely for Fox. "Temptation Island" is Fox's highest rated show — yes, even over "The Simpsons," "Malcolm in the Middle," and the "X-Files." It's a fixture in Nielsen's top 15 and its finale at the end of the month will probably crack the top 10. US magazine ran a cover story asking "Who Will Cheat?" and, as if you needed further proof of the show's success, "Temptation Island II" is in the works.

You have to wonder what kind of people would agree to this arrangement. Actually you don't, because the motivation is pretty clear: fame. The contestants aren't there for the "experience" as US unctuously insists. You get a clear picture of their motives every time you see someone from "Survivor" doing a commercial, walking down a runway or appearing on a television show: they're doing it to be seen, to be discovered, to market themselves. The goal is to go from being the island's resident temptress or stud to playing that role on a soap opera.

Okay, so if fame and fortune motivate the folks appearing on the show, what prompts us to watch? The obvious response is voyeurism, but I don't think that's all that is going on. And while some "reality" shows do develop a coherent narrative, these narratives don't begin to compare with stories you can read, see in the movies or even on television. We watch, in large part, because shows like "Temptation Island" conform to the way we see our own lives — a way of seeing that has come to us via entertainment.

In his book, Life The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, social critic Neal Gabler chronicles the rise of what he calls the "lifie." Since the end of World War II, the values, priorities and perspectives of the entertainment world have become dominant in our culture. As we have embraced what is sometimes called the "celebrity culture," the line between entertainment and what we used to call the "real world" has blurred. After "decades of public-relations contrivances and media hype ... life has become art." (Emphasis in the original.) "The two have become indistinguishable from one another."

Increasingly we all see ourselves as starring in our "life movie" or "lifie." Our consumer and lifestyle choices serve to bring us to closer to that moment when we, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, can say "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

An ever growing segment of the American economy is now devoted to designing, building and dressing the sets in which we live, work, shop and play; to creating our costumes; to making our hair shine and our faces glow, to slenderizing our bodies; to supplying our props — all that we can appropriate the trappings of celebrity, if not the actuality of it, for the life movie. We even have celebrities — for example, lifestyle advisor Martha Stewart — who are essentially drama coaches in the life movie, instructing us how to make our own lives more closely approximate the movie in our mind's eye.

If Gabler is right — and I think he is — then many of us unconsciously see our lives as a sort of movie or TV show. In that case, it makes sense that many of watch shows, such as "Temptation Island," were people do that consciously — especially if the show adds sex to the mix. And the prospect of watching a person being dumped or humiliated isn't a problem. In a "lifie," watching these is like watching Norma Desmond unravel. It may be unsettling or even disturbing, but it's not real, or so we think.

Pointing out the false values that make shows like "Temptation Island" possible doesn't absolve Fox of responsibility. "Temptation Island" is pornographic. Not because of its licentiousness, but because of what it employs as the source of entertainment. Just as what we usually call pornography takes what's intimate and exploits it for entertainment purposes, garbage like "Temptation Island" takes what should be private and a matter of great seriousness — our struggle with temptation — and turns into a public spectacle. It makes light of one of the most important promises we make to each other. The promise to be faithful and honor our commitments is turned into dramatic fodder: "will he or won't he be true?"

The people on the island have no business being there. But the producers have even less business tempting them into going. Even if the contestants don't value their dignity, the network, as well as the audience, should. So why doesn't it work that way? Because, in 21st century America, even human dignity is a commodity that can be bought and sold. Instead of being something "inalienable" (to borrow a word from Thomas Jefferson), something inseparable from being human — or as Christians would say, being "created in the image of God" — dignity has become optional. It's something I can put on or take off, as my mood or the demands of my "lifie" dictate. So, in the end we have contestants who don't value their dignity, producers who see that dignity as a commodity, and an audience that would gladly trade places with them.