If you tune into ABC’s new hidden-camera series expecting the big laughs you used to get from, say, “Candid Camera” or the hilarious Canadian series “Just For Laughs,” chances are good you probably won’t fall for “Would You Fall For That?”
The series, from the producers of “What Would You Do?” isn’t as good as it should or could be. For one thing, we’re talking psychological jokes, not practical jokes, so it’s all taken sort of seriously. And seriously, if you pull a hidden-camera trick, I want at least one person to end up on the bad side of a banana peel.
Cast members — ABC reporter Nick Watt and actors Scott Rogowsky and Sasheer Zamata — are more concerned with testing people’s gullibility than in making viewers laugh — finding unsuspecting folks in and around NYC (parks, studios and public spaces).
In one skit, Rogowsky asks strangers in Central Park to take his picture. A couple of men come by carrying a big sign. Will the photographer notice? Most don’t.
In another skit, they use an old psychological study showing how people are tricked into believing a general horoscope is specific to them. Watt plays an astrologer filming a TV pilot, giving fake private readings to the six participants. Each is told the same thing and they all fall for it. Watt then tells them that they were duped. Uncomfortable. More uncomfortable is how, between skits, the cast members do the old, fake “spontaneous” chat. And, no, I wasn’t tricked into believing it’s real.
Look, we New Yorkers already have enough to be psychologically uncomfortable about with the terrible twins lurking about — Trick & Tweet — aka Eliot Spitzer and Carlos Danger. They’re all the serious jokes we can take.