Tonight's the night.

It's here. You're watching, aren't you? C'mon, admit it, you're fascinated.

"It's not television. It's birth control."

The sad thing is that it is television. It's television at its worst. It's television exploiting life for its own gain. Commercial advertisements, promotion and exploitation. It's what television has become, and for them to say it's not television is a lie.

Kids are "borrowing" actual children. It's not one of those cyber deals where it's like Robo-kid and they can cancel the game and start over. These are real kids with real parents - not the ones on the show - other parents who sold the kids to the show, and I can only imagine the family photo album and YouTube video that the kid will see when he's twelve.

"Hey Billy, check it out. This is you when we sold you to this TV show because we had too much credit card debt and gasoline was $4 a gallon (you remember gasoline, right?) and we needed some money. We figured it would help us and it wasn't going to be something you'd remember - unless you underwent psychotherapy and some hypnotist made you remember - so we figured that we'd just make some money off of your pea-sized brain and repressed instincts."

"Gee, thanks mom. I love you, too."

In case you think perhaps I'm hammering this subject a little too much, let me establish the point that I believe that programs like The Baby Borrowers are at the basement of every ethical, moral and spiritual belief that I hold dear. The people at NBC who are responsible for it should be fired and Don Imus should be hired to replace them. It's so bad at this point that a jackass like Imus would be a step upward.

Anthony's Rule of Thumb #3: Prime-time television in the summer is the entertainment equivalent of throwing crap on a wall to see how much of it sticks. If it's offensive, it doesn't matter because it's the summer. If people like it, we'll see more of it in the fall.

The idea that the weirdos at NBC think that it's "Birth Control" contributes nothing to the social experiment, but to the strange morality that the network is trying to preach at the expense of children. Children who are powerless to say "no" to the nonsense that is perpetuated by a network that has apparently run out of ways to entertain us.

Here's an idea: A scripted program with characters that are developed over a period of time that viewers can identify with and come to appreciate and become interested in the way they would characters in a great novel or film.

Whatever happened to that?