Well, even for what passes as television entertainment these days, this is twisted. A Dutch production company responsible for the reality show Big Brother will premier a new reality show where three contestants will battle over a human kidney.
Ailing contestants will compete for a dying woman's kidneys in a TV reality show.
The Big Donor Show – made by Endemol, the company behind Big Brother – is due to appear on Dutch TV on Friday.
A cancer victim aged 37, identified only as Lisa, will give her kidneys to one of three individuals who makes the best case in a short video.
Viewers will vote by text to urge her who to choose after the videos – which will detail the contestants' lives and loves – have been broadcast.
The three contestants, who are aged between 18 and 40, could wait years for a kidney to come through normal channels. All have degenerative kidney illnesses.
However, the Dutch donor authority said the show was "a step towards organ trading".
The broadcast is being met by revulsion across the Netherlands and in neighbouring Germany transplant clinics have criticised the "macabre element" to the show.
Dutch MP Joop Atsma of the governing Christian Democrats called the Big Donor Show "degrading, heartless, morally wrong and reprehensible".
He said revulsion for the programme was growing across Europe.
What's next? Wheel of Liver? Name That Organ? This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to pick a single line of criticism. While television has spent many years robbing game show contestants of their human dignity for "entertainment" purposes, this is, I think, the first time they've robbed them of their humanity outright. We have entered the bread and circuses phase, haven't we?
It will not be long until there are gladiatorial contests to the death being televised, I fear. For "entertainment", of course.
In a near-future novel that’s finished but may never be published, I imagined a future game show in which people who have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses compete for the opportunity to die, in creative and entertaining ways, on television.