TV’s Kinkiest Link Sets Out on a Little Union Busting

America’s newest, cruelest, much ballyhooed harridan, Anne Robinson, sports a seeming erudition, what with her acerbic tongue and haughty mien as host of NBC’s latest hit game show “The Weakest Link.” But most of the contestants she’s questioning are such dolts that the show should have been called “The Missing Link.”

Imported British smarts were supposed to distinguish this hybrid knock-off--”Survivor” meets “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”--but true to form, the American cultural juggernaut has squashed it into pulp fit only for U.S. public consumption. Brains have not been its forte. The secret of “Link’s” success is not its meager content, but rather its latent sex appeal.

Robinson, after all, is dressed in stiletto heels and black leather for a reason. Her schoolmarmish pose, complete with spectacles and flawless Queen’s English, is a stock fetish for your average type-A CEO who enjoys being spanked, paddled, leashed and otherwise humiliated on his lunch break. The only props Robinson is missing are a riding crop and a cigarillo. And, well, she’s a redhead. Need I say more? You have to hand it to the network. They’ve managed to slip a little S&M; into prime time. Sublime and utterly subliminal. And they’re getting away with it.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, the age of black bra feminism; the comeback of the second sex, Camille Paglia style. The era of the steel magnolia, not the shrinking violet, the high-powered, fast-talking vixen who isn’t going to whine her way to equal pay. She’s going to take it out in trade. Move over Betty and Bella; here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.

Seduce us. Please.

There she stands, coldly statuesque, behind the swiftly swiveling dais, the paragon of modern womanhood come-of-age, quipping and carping and whipping up the crowd, tough and tart as Margaret Thatcher in her prime.

And it really is so Tory in spirit, because under its same-old, same-old veneer of sappy, scrappy TV, it’s the ultimate in union busting. Hollywood is, after all, gearing up for a nasty writers’ strike that will, in all likelihood, wreak fiscal havoc to the tune of billions of dollars. “Weakest Link,” like every other scriptless, actorless cash grab boondoggle on the networks all season, doesn’t require writers. It merely requires a decoy and an edge over the competition. Hence the carrot-top dominatrix. She’ll make us forget that all those sniping, drooling dunderheads on stage with her are really just a bunch of scabs--as, essentially, are we, the audience.

Sex has always been the best distraction from politics. It’s Bill Clinton’s legacy made flesh. What could be more subtly titillating than Anne Robinson’s iterated signature dismissal: “You are the weakest link. Goodbye”? It’s hardly surprising that the show was a hit across the pond. It’s straight out of Monty Python or Benny Hill. Pure, prim lechery of the kind only a nation of colossally repressed, over-educated, xenophobic perverts could ever dream up and pull off. It wouldn’t work if Robinson weren’t too, too British and if Americans didn’t suffer from an immense cultural inferiority complex.

We Yanks may not be getting the game, cerebrally speaking. But whether we know it or not, you can bet we’re thoroughly enjoying it, for all the filthiest reasons. Meanwhile those poor, irate scribes in Studio City are tearing out their hair.