“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” H.L. Mencken once said, and unfortunately, he’s been proved right over and over again.

Here’s the latest example: An upcoming Fox show called Someone’s Gotta Go, “a reality series in which real companies that are struggling to stay afloat in this lousy economy agree to let their staffs decide who among them will get pink-slipped to cut costs,” according to television columnist Lisa de Moraes writing in The Washington Post.

“Each week, a different company will be showcased,” according to the Post story. “Each week, that company’s boss or owner will call the employees together and tell them someone has to be laid off. He or she will give the employees all the available information about one another—salaries, job evaluations, etc.—and let them decide who gets the pink slip.”

Am I hallucinating, or does crap like this really pass for entertainment in 21st century America? Even Donald Trump’s silly and tired show The Apprentice has gotten away from firing real people and now has graduated to a “celebrity” version where The Donald gets to say “You’re fired” to B- and C-List celebrities who have nothing better to do.

Not only is Someone’s Gotta Go an HR nightmare (more on that in a minute), but who in their right mind thinks that employees ganging up and voting to fire one of their co-workers, Survivor-style, has any entertainment value at all in the middle of a recession where 600,000 real-life workers are getting tossed on the street every month?

Producer Mike Darnell told the Post that he got the idea for the show from an item on a cable channel in which a small-business owner let all her workers know what each person in the company was getting paid.

 “We’ve taken it a step further,” Darnell said, “and opened up the books to everybody’s salary, opened up their HR files and let them talk about each other and to each other— this one’s lazy, this one’s a hard worker, I hear this one’s having an affair. And in the end they will decide who’s to go.”

I’ve written about this before, but employees talking about pay is never a good idea, despite what some might think. It’s a nightmare for managers and HR when people do, at least in my experience. And sharing the content of confidential personnel files with everyone in the company is a nightmare scenario that should make any decent HR person want to run screaming into the night.

My hope is that Someone’s Gotta Go turns out to be so campy and odd that it comes off as a real-life version of The Office rather than anything that has a hint of reality to it. And given that it will air on Fox, the likelihood is far greater that it will turn out to be more of a bomb like Temptation Island or Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire than a popular hit like American Idol.

I appreciate great workplace humor. For example, I love both the British and American versions of The Office, and I believe that just about any situation in life can have a humorous edge.

But, I don’t trust Fox, or the Dutch company behind this show (which also created the trashy summer series Big Brother) to pull off a reality show about layoffs with any real wit or humor.

Maybe Mencken was right about the intelligence of the American people. In today’s economy, a TV show about the fun of firing your co-worker is nothing less than tasteless and cruel, especially since so many can see so much of it going on for real around them every day.

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