KILLER RATINGS : 'Murder in Small Town X'.

Desperate times call for desperate measures--in television as in all other fields. As the vogue for reality programming continues to roll, juggernaut-like, across the TV landscape, the networks in particular are scrambling for safety, brandishing a newly fabricated batch of high-concept shows like white flags raised in surrender. Sheer panic, rather than inspiration, must surely have been the motivating force behind Fox's embarrassing summer offering "Murder in Small Town X," which wrapped up on September 4, after seven cringe-inducing episodes.

Fueled though it was by reality-TV tropes, "Murder" was, rather remarkably, based on sheer fiction. Admittedly, creative casting and editing inevitably set shows like NBC's "Fear Factor" or Fox's "Temptation Island" at several removes from fact, but "Murder" yoked documentary and fiction together with a violence that was downright fascinating. The premise dispatched ten ostensibly ordinary Americans--a media planner from Chicago, a bartender from Staten Island, a medical student from Fort Lauderdale, etc.--to the small town of Sunrise, Maine, to solve a brutal multiple murder by a Peeping Tom-style killer. In the tradition of the classic detective story, the isolated milieu harbored a slew of colorful suspects with elaborate backstories and motives for criminal activity--Prudence Connor, the femme-fatale owner of an auto repair shop, for example, or Hayden DeBeck, the former businessman at the head of a sinister cult.

To cover their bases, the creators of "Murder" tossed in some staples from blockbuster horror tales. The picturesque town of Sunrise, with its sailboats bobbing in the harbor, turned out, in the vein of a Stephen King horror tale, to teem with occult-flavored phenomena: a vandalized grave, a cooler filled with blood, a set of fingers that turned up in a sardine can (packed in oil and mustard, forensic tests revealed). And the cinematography (the hand-held camera sequences in seemingly overexposed black and white, the shots of wildflowers twined into hex-like Xs) stole blatantly from 1999's The Blair Witch Project, a movie whose sensational popularity has made it a template for better-safe-than-sorry pop-culture artists.

But the adherence of "Murder" to genre blueprints didn't stop there: From title sequence to closing credits, the show furnished viewers with a splendid opportunity to note how, in the course of the past year, stylistic tics from CBS's boffo "Survivor" have fossilized into reality-show convention. The candid frontal shots of individual "investigators" making catty remarks about each other copied the CBS program, as did the weekly bouts of voting that fueled resentment and rivalry by allowing participants to eliminate each other. Equally derivative was the grandstanding of "Murder" facilitator Gary Fredo, a real-life police sergeant who talked the sleuthing team through the baroque "rules" governing each episode (only slightly less complicated than the U.S. tax code, the "rules" involved cast-mates in answering the killer's quiz questions about potential clues and making nighttime forays to creepy locales, camera in hand). What the Renaissance was to the sonnet, the turn of the millennium has been to reality TV: the incubation period of a formula whose very restrictiveness is a source of its allure.

There is something soothing about conventions, of course, particularly in a whodunnit context. "The story must conform to certain formulas," W.H. Auden commented in "The Guilty Vicarage," the essay in which he confessed that "for me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol." Prefacing the essay with a quote from Romans 7 ("I had not known sin, but by the law"), Auden analyzed the detective story in terms of its moral import: In the paradigmatic murder-mystery narrative, the detective returns a sin-beset community to a state of grace by isolating and expelling the guilty party. Detective fiction thus allows the typical fan, who "suffers from a sense of sin," to luxuriate in "the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden."

Auden was writing about the classic, English mystery tradition, which encompasses, for example, the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown tales. Fox's "Murder," by contrast, drew on that genre's quintessentially American variation--the "hard-boiled" detective story, exemplified by the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The hard-boiled mystery rebels against Auden's tidy guilt-catharsis blueprint: a sleuth like Hammett's Sam Spade operates in a world in which, as the critic George Grella observed, "crime is not a temporary aberration, but a ubiquitous fact." Innocence? The Garden of Eden? Try gangsters, crooked politicians, and a corrupt police force. Hard-boiled fiction paints the world in grays rather than blacks and whites: even the detective gets caught up in lies and seediness. When one of the "investigators" on "Murder" wore a wire into a strip joint and started ogling a writhing dancer, he was trekking in Sam Spade's footsteps.

Hard-boiled mysteries remain pleasurable, however, even as they depict a sin-infused world, because, while learning about the crime and its aftermath, at least you know that you didn't do it. For the space of a couple hundred pages, or a movie reel or two, you can wallow in guiltlessness. What made "Murder" striking--arguably marking a new kind of consumer complicity in the creation of American pop culture--is that it permitted no such confidence. We did do it. After all, had audiences not rewarded CBS for generating "Survivor," that series would have spawned no progeny. So viewers who tuned in to "Murder" on Tuesday nights as the summer waned (and Reader, I am one) had to fault their own voyeuristic impulses for that stagy film noir funeral, with the thunder raking the soundtrack--or for those shots of the "investigators" lounging in the Jacuzzi, gossiping frantically for the benefit of the camera. Culpability, it seems, can be measured in Nielsen ratings. Every generation gets the murder mysteries it deserves.