This week on Cops, "Deep Pockets with Jack Doobie."

Cop: "Hey there, buddy, (frisking a shirtless, longhaired man and coming up with a bag of pot the size of a hoagie) that's a lot of weed for recreational use."

I'm sucked in. As soon as the catchy Cops theme song starts up, I'm hooked for a good hour, and believe me, I'm not at all happy about it. I swear my IQ loses a few points whenever FOX announces a new episode of World's Scariest Household Plants, but I end up watching anyway. And that's because like every other dumbed-down American, I'm a voyeur.

I have a suspicion that our country's obsession with televising other people's foibles really got going in the early 80's with America's Funniest Home Videos. We all remember Bob Saget, the Full House guy, cracking corny jokes while some poor schmuck got socked in the nuts with a whiffle bat by his toddler. "Oooh," he'd croon in his facetious sympathetic tone, "THAT's gotta hurt. He just swung at ball one!" We'd laugh along with the bad jokes and pretty soon we were making our own videos of brides having their dresses torn off by rambunctious family pets and standing at the altar in their bras and garters in the hopes of winning 10 Gs. Sales of video camcorders exploded after that and soon every damn holiday was marred by my stepfather trotting out the camera and me snarling "Get that fu**ing thing out of my face." Yeah, that caused some tension.

Voyeurism definitely found a foothold in the 80's. Remember Geraldo Rivera's amazing Al Capone debacle?

"Hello, folks, Geraldo Rivera here outside of Al Capone's vaults. Tonight on FOX, we're going to break into Capone's secret lair and reveal its contents. The vaults have never been opened and we're not sure what we'll find, but I promise you it will be exciting."

Not as exciting as when Geraldo opened the vaults three hours later to reveal a dusty room completely emptied save for a few crates of aged liquor. Talk about anti-climactic. Talk about flop-sweat. But I'd watched it all, every excruciating minute, even though it was a school night. Because what could be more exciting that watching history being made right on TV? But as fun as it was, by the late 80's jaded viewers grew tired of watching drunk Aunt Shirley fall off the deck into the fishpond. We wanted something grittier, we wanted something more. And then came Cops.

When I think back on the state of television in the 90's, I immediately think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man. In the futuristic 1987 movie, (based coincidentally on a Stephen King short story), Ah-nuld is wrongfully convicted of a crime and must fight for his life on a game show which attempts to kill criminals with vicious gladiators who hunt them. The show is the highest-rated program on television and the viewing audience is enthralled by the gruesome punishment meted out. Four years later, Cops is introduced to the Saturday night lineup of prime time television. Life imitates art.

Cops always begins with a their catchy "Bad Boys" theme song and their affirmation that these are "real cops on real assignment," and we get the date and time stamp at the bottom right hand corner, "Dade County Police, Wednesday, 12:35 a.m." So now I'm thinking, wow, this could have happened last night!