About 14 years ago, I saw this Czech movie called "Accumulator 1," a nifty sci-fi parable set in a world where people who appeared on television had, simply by being on TV, created a duplicate version of themselves on the other side of the screen -- and the doppelgangers started sucking the life out of their originals whenever they watched TV.

Lately when I watch TV, I feel the life force getting sucked out of me -- because of too many people trying way too hard to get on TV.

It's not the thousands who lined up outside EnergySolutions Arena last summer to get on "American Idol," or the hundreds who lined up at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center last month to audition for "So You Think You Can Dance." Shows like that at least create their own built-in meritocracy, in which one has to perform to please producers and (ultimately) a national audience or go home.

I don't even mind the skanks and himbos whose life's ambition is to appear on a reality dating show, whether it's "The Bachelorette" or "Flavor of Love" and its many VH1 spin-offs. Sacrificing self-respect and dignity for game-show riches is a concept as old as "Queen for a Day" and "The Newlywed Game," and there's a guilty pleasure in watching these speed-dating rituals play themselves out.

No, the TV spectacle that's most troubling is when someone jumps into the nation's collective consciousness for some random reason, and then gets sucked into the vortex of TV-news producers eager to fill airtime.

Usually it starts with something silly and/or stupid that shows up on YouTube. Think of the dorky kid practicing his light saber moves in his garage, or the guys dropping Mentos into bottles of cola to watch them explode, or the wedding party in which everybody choreographed their entrance. The list is endless.

When one of these things shows up, a familiar routine kicks into gear. First, the oddity catches the attention of a local reporter, who calls up the insta-celebrity to ask how he or she wound up on YouTube. The local reporter writes it up for the paper or TV report. That report moves along the wires to a national news producer, who decides the video is just kooky enough to kill a few minutes of cable-news airtime and provide a distraction from the boring news -- like health care or the war in Iraq.

Calls are made, flights are booked, satellite time is reserved. And suddenly, Mentos Boy is experiencing Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame -- with only five minutes of material.

In a few rare cases, the national news interview isn't the end of the line.

For Jon & Kate Gosselin, giving birth to sextuplets (after already having two kids) went from the national news shows to a documentary on The Learning Channel. That begat a series, "Jon & Kate Plus Eight," which turned the family into a marketable commodity. The result, it could be argued, was that prolonged fame not only exposed the strains in the marriage but exacerbated them -- to the point where the Gosselins, under the watchful eye of the tabloids, announced their divorce plans on national TV.

And rather than serving as a cautionary tale, the Gosselins are the model for other overly fertile families to grab for that same brass ring -- the ultimate example being Nadia Sulieman, the infamous "Octomom," who is prepping her own reality show.

Last week, it seemed as if someone -- a family in Utah -- was finally saying "no" to the national-news machine.

The starting point was police dashboard-camera footage from the Weber County Sheriff's Office, of a police cruiser following a car in Plain City -- and learning that the driver was a 7-year-old who had commandeered the family auto so he could avoid church.

It's a story any reporter (and I'm not immune) would jump at the chance to cover, a cute kid scenario right out of "Dennis the Menace."

But the family wasn't playing along. Thursday, a Weber County Sheriff's official issued a statement, saying the family was declining media requests because they didn't want to reward the boy for his bad behavior.

Hooray! Finally, parents who put discipline and privacy ahead of vanity and celebrity.

But the same day the sheriff's office made that statement, the family was flying to New York to appear Friday morning on NBC's "Today." Discipline and privacy are one thing, but a free trip to New York is something else -- even if the appearance opens the family up to charges of lax parenting, and gives the green light to late-night comics to mock them.

Again, TV wins -- and a bit of the life force gets sucked out of all of us who watch.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture