A modest proposal: NBC's next hit show

Under Ben Silverman’s visionary guidance, NBC has embarked upon a bold new initiative: Signaling defeat by raising the white flags of uninspired remakes of dubious old programs.

Quite a while back, NBC announced its intentions to resurrect “American Gladiators” (which will only work if they bring back the guy in this clip, with the same hair but ideally with a huge beer gut). Here’s guessing they’ll ramp up the “extreme” elements and incorporate, WWE-style, leather-clad, evil gladiators to fully bring the moronic concept into the 21st century (not realizing that simply by being a moronic concept, it’ll fit into the 21st century just fine).

This past week, NBC announced it would be remaking “Knight Rider,” the old Hasselhoff humiliation about a guy with a talking car. Only not really – in the OnStar Age, talking cars are a dime a dozen (well, actually more like $278,388.86 a dozen, but you get the point), and since buying the rights to the “Transformers” franchise would’ve been too costly, they’re calling it “Knight Rider” and having the cars able to morph into different things in a fashion that NBC hopes will be just different enough to keep the intellectual-property-rights lawyers at bay. No doubt this re-imagining will strive more for cool than campy, like this year’s “Bionic Woman” redux.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that NBC, whose motto was once upon a time “The Quality Shows,” is trotting out for viewers these days. They couldn’t be any more pointed in their attitude toward their viewers if they just aired something called “The Bird,” a frenetically edited hour of extended middle fingers bursting from your TV screen.

And so, in that spirit, I offer yet another updated remake for NBC: “The Gong Show,” Chuck Barris’s ritualistic mortification of a talent show, but with an exciting new component in keeping with our times that will truly measure how desperate people are to get on Television.

It will still feature the same sort of bizarro-world performers, but instead of a gong, the judges will have a newer, high-tech means of putting an end to an abysmal act. Even over-zealous law-enforcement officers have embraced this new method of stopping people whose act has grown tiresome, and viewers seem to enjoy watching this means of tough-love dispensed. Hence, I present you with NBC’s new hit show: “Taser the Talent.”

Ben, give me a call. We can have this puppy on the air by January.