Other guests have humbler exploitative goals--merely to get on a show. For one Oprah show the bookers found four couples who alleged they were struggling with various strains of sexual jealousy. A man and woman in their middle 20s got Oprah's attention. He was an accountant, she a homemaker. She felt jealous all right, but not the kind of jealousy they had promised the booker--"bikini-dad women at work." The wife was jealous of his work, period! Bikini-clad women had nothing to do with it.
When this tidbit of truth finally tumbled out of the wife's mouth, Oprah rendered a sublime imitation of Mount Vesuvius. "This is why you came on the show, to discuss your jealousy over his working long hours to get ahead?" she sputtered with anger--then turned to me. "What do you have to say about that, Dr. Fischoff?"
"About what in particular?" I asked, searching for something to focus on.
"About anything. Just talk," she hissed. So I spoke while Oprah brooded and paced. The housewife was shocked and hurt. "Why was Oprah so upset?" she asked me later. "After all, I just want-ed to get on Oprah. Doesn't everyone?"
Others who grope for air time are not quite as naive. There are a handful of guests, often transvestites or people with multiple personality disorder, who somehow hop from show to show, flaunting their oddities.
The Jeering Crowd
Spectators they are not. If you take the studio audience out of the picture, you take away the talk show spectacle as we know it. The audience provides tribal impact, people provoking people to say and do things they would never say or do unless they were drunk or assured anonymity.
The audience is laced with sharpshooters and soapboxers who all too often use a guest to draw themselves into the limelight, to engage not in dialogue but in inquisition. The more their questions make the guest squirm and lose control, the more powerful the audience members feel. That makes a guest something of a defendant. The audience members are judge and jury. And they will try to take your head off, for they sing the executioner's song.
Audiences may not walk in the studio with their fangs bared, but they are soon salivating vampirically. Before the show goes on they are exhorted by a warm-up staff to "Say what's on your mind," "Don't hold back," "You don't like what they're saying, tell them!" When the guests come on stage and climb out on a ledge, the audience is already whipped up--transformed into a crowd of Manhattan pedestrians, looking skyward, urging the pathetic wackoon the fifteenth-floor window ledge to jump.
As an expert, you sit on stage and feel the negative charges of electricity hurtling out of the audience, enveloping the guests. But your expert status is by no means a safe-house. The audience's opinions are deliberately placed on even footing with those of the expert.
The expert may have the training, the clinical experience, or other bona fides to offer an educated opinion about a topic under discussion. But the audience members come armed with their personal experiences, the equalizing power of the studio mike, and the encouragement of the host to "let it rip." A meeting of the minds it isn't. If you go against the audience's strident opinions, they go against you.
The show was Sally Jessy Raphael The subject: "Men Who Won't Commit." The audience kept spewing questions at the hapless males (are there any other kind on most talk shows?) on the stage. "Immature, immature," yelled women (and some men) in the audience, pointing fingers like Winchester rifles. I jumped in and noted that sometimes women confuse a man's general fear of commitment with an unwillingness to commit to a specific woman. And rather than maturity, it is often social conditioning and other less romantic agendas that compel many women to push for a marriage commitment.
Big mistake! The audience fell on me like children smashing a pinata. I might just as well have accused Mother Teresa of being a transsexual. Sally loved it, of course. What she didn't love was when one of the "uncommitted" proposed marriage on stage and placed an engagement ring on his girlfriend's finger. The exploiters got exploited.
The Ringmaster
You have seen him or her on television a hundred times nurturing those with righteous, sympathetic causes or ripping into the misfits, opportunists, and freaks. Phil? You think you know him. Sally? You think you know her. But you don't. Most hosts's sympathies and concerns are all too often mere contrivances to seduce the guest into self-exposure and beguile the television audience. Sympathy bonds freeze during commercial breaks and reanimate when the taping resumes. Caring? There are rare circumstances of on-camera concerns and off-camera follow-ups. But these tender moments are often later publicly exploited by the shows's spin doctors.
And rarely (Oprah is the occasional exception) is the expert treated any differently. For most talk show hosts, when the show ends, so does the existence of experts. I've been on tabloid (Geraldo, Oprah, Sally) and non-tabloid (Sonya Friedman, Larry King) talk shows dozens of times. Except for Montel, a host has never chatted with me before or after a show. Many colleagues relate similar tales of off-camera invisibility.
Call in the Clowns
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