These men will perform on cue, say dumb things, reveal dumb attitudes about fidelity or inattention to their partner's needs. They get pummeled--but they leave the stage unscathed. For them it's a joke. "I hope you'll get off my back now," I heard one young man say to his girlfriend as they left the stage at the end of the show. She had just ripped him apart on stage but now was all warm and cuddly . . . for the moment.
There are men in the audience, but most are recruited by magazine ads and audience brokers. They sometimes ask questions and make pronouncements, but their hearts aren't in it. That's obvious when you sit on stage and watch them squirm as Oprah or Sally walks by: "Not me, please don't ask me to speak." Women, on the other hand, line up, stand up, raise their hands, shout, "Me, let me speak!" This is their chance to take out a few of the Neanderthal men or viperous women who inhabit every woman's nightmare and probably most women's autobiography of woe.
Circus Gratuitus
Unless they are from Mars or Venus and have never seen these talk shows, never seen the guests behave like Gong Show alumni or the experts pander away their professional prestige to the theatrical demands of the burlesque format, why do people continue to go on them? Why do they risk damaging personal life or professional limb? Because guests and experts alike whisper to themselves, "I can do better." But they don't. Because they can't. The iron-maiden format of the talk show ensures that.
Talk shows occupy two realities. There's the reality of witnessing a talk show on television in the familiar, benign environment of your home--the "passive reality." Then there's the "active reality" of actually being a guest or expert confronted by the kaleidoscope of glaring studio lights, perambulating cameras, charismatic hosts, stares of the studio audiences, and the mesmerizing fact of being on television. Moreover, the studio is far smaller and more intimate in actuality than it appears on television. The sheer psychologically coercive power of the host and of the people in the audience and on stage, in such close proximity, is invisible to the home audience. And its effects cannot be anticipated, only experienced.
Many times before a show, guests have confidently told me they are sure the show will be a positive experience, even when they have painful topics to discuss. But it is precisely the poor control that guests have over the proceedings (or themselves) that makes the unsophisticated, "Look Ma, I'm on TV" guests such attractive prey for the talk show. Once on stage, a guest's self-restraint evaporates in the hot glare of lights.
Media psychologist colleagues have shared with me similar post-show shellshock. They rarely have the chance to say what they thought they would when they agreed to do the show. Being chastened by the host when one's explanations are too prolonged is jolting. The experts find themselves with two choices: be glib or be ignored.
The Acrobatics
Calm intellectual discourse is unwelcome to most talk show viewers--they want action! Emotions and conflict are the two critical ingredients of the talk show recipe. They give it the tang that is so viewer-addictive. Conflict is king! And producers, hosts, and studio audiences use the guests to sow the seeds.
Certainly conflict is the essence of good storytelling. But the conflicts provoked on stage by hosts and studio audiences are the not scripted fictions of a made-for-TV movie. The tumultuous dramas talk show guests enact are their lives, their wounds, the crimes of their hearts and their loins. Unlike actors, talk show guests must ultimately answer for their on-camera confessions when they return to their everyday lives.
It's one thing to recount your troubles and misdeeds to a stranger in a bar. It's quite another to do it in front of 20 million people. But it's the predictable unpredictability of the dirty-linen flaunting that viewers find so irresistible.
The Dancing Bears
My talk show experiences make one thing painfully clear: Most guests are drawn from America's abundant population of have nots. They have not high intelligence. They have not high income. They have not many opportunities. They have not any way to snatch the brief celebrity that television confers except to exhibit themselves. They sell their misery the way hookers sell their bodies.
Talk show tradition is like a limbo bar. The lower it goes, the lower people who follow must go to play the game successfully. Guests will say the most intimate things precisely because they have watched others do it before them. If guests discuss their sex lives, other guests will do the same. If guests attack their spouses, other guests will do the same. And if guests admit to incest, incredibly, other guests will go on to do the same. Like some revivalist tent show, once guests have fallen to the ground, touched by the spirit, speaking in tongues, others will follow, tongues wagging, shame and privacy shunted aside.
Some guests, of course, are more canny, intent on exploiting the exploiters. One woman called after seeing me on a talk show. She told me she had the disease du jour, multiple personality disorder. She wanted to go on The Home Show or Geraldo (she had seen me on both) so she could tell her story and maybe get a producer to option her life for a television movie. She had heard I was also a screenwriter. If I would help her get on, she said, she would let me write the screenplay.
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