When the Writers Guild of America went on strike this fall, the major television networks were forced to tear up their schedules for early 2008. Now, with no end to the strike in sight, the gaping holes in midseason evening viewing are being filled with “unscripted” programming — specifically, reality and game shows. The latest of these to receive a hasty battlefield promotion from development to primetime premiere is Fox’s “The Moment of Truth,” a half-hour celebration of anxiety and embarrassment during which Americans can watch their countrymen put their ethical, marital, and familial credibility on the line for cash.

Host Mark L. Wahlberg (the “Temptation Island” referee, not the actor) announces at the top of the program, “The only thing that separates a person from $500,000 is 21 questions and their ability to answer these questions with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” If they answer a question honestly, contestants move closer to the big foam-core printed check. If they lie, well, there’s always the home version of the game.

The setup for what the network is calling “the simplest game on television” requires a lot of perpetration. Before taping, the show’s contestants are wired up to a polygraph machine and put through a battery of 75 questions, polling them on points they’re least likely to come clean about on national television. Though long ago debunked as a reliable adjudicator of truth, the polygraph, which measures changes in heart rate, skin conductivity, breathing, and blood pressure, is a reliable documenter of unease. During the pre-show examinations, it is used to assess whether a contestant is being candid in his or her responses to such queries as: “Do fat people repulse you?” and “Do you think your boyfriend Jeff might be gay?”

Come showtime, in the hot seat facing a couch-load of loved ones, the studio audience, and a battery of cameras, the pre-screened contestants are asked 21 of the same questions again, this time by Mr. Wahlberg and guest inquisitors (including a genuine overweight person) selected to up the tension. Lights rake, bells clang, and music churns as the participants weigh the options of saying what they said before (and presumably what they really believe) about forgiving the deadbeat dad now standing in front of them or whether Jeff’s homosexuality is more of a Stephen Foster thing than a Tom of Finland thing. Yes or no? “That answer,” intones a disembodied female voice, “is …” followed by a solid 10-count pause before confirming or denying with a “true” or a “false.” That pause and its accompanying series of close-ups on the tormented faces of all present and concerned is the program’s money-shot montage — a nosy probing of just how uncomfortable TV can make everyday folks who have volunteered to have their dirty laundry cut up into sound bites and aired for the entire nation to see.

Executive produced by “Extreme Makeover” creator Howard Schultz, “The Moment of Truth,” which makes its premiere tomorrow at 9 p.m., is a Colombian television import that has already spawned versions in 23 countries. At home in Colombia, the wildly popular show was briefly taken off the air when, in the throes of competition, a contestant revealed she had briefly retained the services of a hit man to end her unhappy marriage. The American “The Moment of Truth” sticks to the personal, not the conspiratorial, and the show’s producers have clearly selected people with the right kind of lies to tell in prime time. Instead of a homicidally desperate housewife, we get a former male model who may or may not have stuffed his underwear at photo shoots.

If “The Moment of Truth” sounds familiar, it’s likely because there have been at least four different polygraph-based television programs aired in America previously. But these prior versions (one in the early 1960s, another hosted by Jack Anderson in the ’70s, an ’80s retooling with F. Lee Bailey, and a 2005 show with Rolanda Watts — all called “Lie Detector”) used public personalities, convicted criminals, and disgraced members of various professions as contestant-victims, not lingerie models and newlyweds.

The Rolanda Watts “Lie Detector” made its debut with President Clinton’s nemesis, Paula Jones, in the hot seat. Mr. Bailey memorably welcomed convicted Nebraska thrill-kill conspirator Caril Ann Fugate to explain her role in Charlie Starkweather’s string of murders in 1958. Fugate, who maintained her innocence of the murder charges for which she received a life sentence in 1959 and a parole in 1976, felt so exonerated by Mr. Bailey’s examination that she held a post-show press conference and requested a pardon from the state of Nebraska. Evidently, the governor never tuned in.

At their most extreme, and arguably their most entertaining, game shows posit a contestant’s shameless greed, self-delusion, and masochism against an audience’s corresponding lust to see dignity stripped like hearts torn from the chests of ancient Mayan sacrifices. The American game show is, in fact, a pop culture institution whose scope and history are so utterly perverse that it is immune to satire. There is simply no conceptual mockery that can outdo an intentional lowest-common-denominator wallow like the grinning, one-on-one emotional abuse of Chuck Barris’s “The New Treasure Hunt” or “The Money Maze,” another 1970s show on which couples took turns directing each other through people-sized labyrinths like rats in an animal psychology experiment gone awry. “The Moment of Truth,” a deadly serious and yet somehow facetious discourse on human pettiness, appears ready to take its place in the pantheon of the compulsively watchable and unlampoonably crass.