Even reality television has its limits, and the BBC—that vaunted public trust—may have found them last week, after advertising for contestants for “Britain’s Hardest Grafter.” The five-part series, which is set to air on BBC2, will pit 25 underpaid young people against each other to win the equivalent of a year’s living wage—roughly £15,500—in a competition that the British press and angry viewers have already called “Hunger Games-style,” “degrading and exploitative,” and “poverty porn.” The show has contestants performing different kinds of blue-collar work to prove they’re the most productive grafter. (That’s British slang for “hard worker.”)

It’s an entertainment concept that’s difficult to defend (though BBC’s PR team is certainly trying, calling it a “serious social experiment” investigating “just how hard people in the low-wage economy work”). Asking poor people to “prove themselves” by laboring in a faux-factory is creepy and dystopian and, yes, kind of reminiscent of The Hunger Games or the bleak futuristic TV show “Black Mirror.” The production company’s description of the show—“At the end of each episode, those who have produced the least will be eliminated”—is both a perfect distillation of capitalism and a nightmarish vision of the future. Over 20,000 people have signed an online petition asking the BBC to scrap the show.

Yet I’m inclined to be a little charitable toward the BBC’s straightforward exploitation right now, if only because on this side of the pond the reality-TV industry has just presented American viewers with something far, far worse.

That would be “The Briefcase,” which began its six-episode run on CBS last Wednesday as the most-watched series of the night. Created by the venal mind behind NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” the would-be inspirational show offers struggling families the opportunity to change their lives—only to manipulate them into feeling guilty about it. In each episode, producers arrive at the home of two couples in the lower-middle class, who think they have signed up to appear in a documentary about money, with a briefcase containing $101,000. “Oh my god, smell it,” one woman says to her husband, pressing the cash against her forehead. Only after they’ve had the chance to imagine what they can do with this windfall—cover medical bills, pay for IVF treatment, repay loans—they hear the catch: They have 72 hours to decide whether to keep all the money, keep part of the money, or give it all away to another family that’s just as needy. There is a lot of crying.

Of course, we viewers at home know that the other family also got the money, and they’re acting out a financial version of the prisoners’ dilemma. And so we watch the couples’ second-guess themselves, judge their own worthiness, accuse their spouses of greed. “Are we awful people?” “Are you going to resent me?” “Do you think that’s fair, to take more than half?” After visiting the other family’s house and learning that her counterpart is a veteran with a prosthetic leg, one participant pulls over the car to vomit onto the side of the road. “I don’t want this decision,” she grimly tells the camera.