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When I do watch television, "Monk" and "House" are two shows I enjoy. In "House," Bertie Wooster plays a doctor who manages to unearth rare diseases in every patient who catches a cold. He and his team of intrepid researchers manage, over the course of just one hour, to subject their hapless patient to MRI’s, Cat Scans, brain surgery, catheterization and amputation before concluding, moments before the poor sod expires, that the guy has a cold. The show usually ends with Dr. House telling him to "take two aspirin and call me in the morning," while fending off hugs from the grateful family and ignoring admiring gazes from his star-struck acolytes.

"Monk," on the other hand, is a joyous affirmation of my tendency to want things to be just so. Despite his obsessive compulsion disorder, Monk manages to solve crimes that no one even knows were committed. He does this in the face of countless dangers, usually managing to find himself immersed in slime, bugs or total chaos.

Both shows offer decent entertainment, however implausible their premise. They both stand in direct contrast to that perversity known as "Reality TV," in which ordinary people subject themselves to public humiliation for the sake of a brush with celebrity.

With certain people this brush with celebrity engenders a desire to replicate the sensation of having people look them and recognize them on the street. This compulsive search for attention is reminiscent of the disorder known as Munchausen Syndrome, in which sufferers repeatedly return to the hospital citing phantom maladies. A related disease, called Munchausen By Proxy involves parents, usually mothers, who bring their children to the hospital, complaining of imagined or even real illnesses and injuries.

The Reality TV disorder, which we shall call the Monk-House Syndrome, requires otherwise merely embarrassing people to repeatedly subject themselves to public humiliation in order to return to their erstwhile status as laughingstocks. Richard Heene is the latest victim of Monk-House syndrome. A former participant on "Wife Swap" and longing to return to the limelight, he is alleged to have concocted a hoax involving a homemade hot air balloon, a missing child, hundreds of would-be rescuers and the attention of millions (so one hears) of television viewers. That the linchpin of this stunt involved his six-year-old son, Falcon, who was supposedly on the balloon, means that Heene has introduced a new Reality TV related disorder to the world of abnormal psychology, called Monk-House By Proxy.

The upside of this disorder is that Heene’s desperate need for attention will probably land him in jail. The recourse taken by a rational society to the scourge of Monk-House syndrome would be to ban Reality TV from the air waves. Short of that, however, I propose a solution. This involves instituting a new Reality TV show for all those whose first bout of public self-abasement wasn’t sufficient.

Each former Bachelor, Bachelorette, Great Racer, Wife Swapper, or Nanny Abuser who wants a little bit more, should be invited to appear on an exciting new Reality TV show called "Survivor: Waziristan." This collection of zany contestants will be dropped off in the wilds of northwest Pakistan, to compete for a million dollar prize.

The new show will have some similarities to the already televised abomination called "Survivor." For example, there will be competing tribes. Unlike "Survivor," however, the contestants won’t be split into two tribes, they will all be in the same tribe, competing against the tribes already occupying the rugged landscape. While contestants will be removed from the show each week, their number won’t be limited to one, and they won’t be "voted off the island." Rather, avid viewers can watch the losers get beheaded on Al Jazeera. Should help the network during Sweeps Week.

At the end of the series, the lone survivor, having managed to remain hidden beneath a pile of moldy sheep skins in the back of a musty cave, will be airlifted out in the company of a squad of Special Forces, to receive his check. If the show works as designed, having spent the last six months doing everything in his power to avoid being noticed, he should be cured of Monk-House Syndrome, and the public will never have to look at him again.