Daytime Talk Show Hosts Play Guests For Fools, Then Call It Therapy

Time was, people talked to each other without being on TV.

In those bygone days, people shared intimacies, swapped lies, blessed each other out, then kissed and made up without the artificial stimulants of cameras, talk-show host and studio audience.

Meanwhile, the people who did do the talking on TV interviews were celebrities and other big wheels, people ordinary folks wouldn’t otherwise encounter.

It was a simple, generally accepted, caste system. How times have changed.

“You are a person with no power, no title, no money, no fame,” says talk-show host Jerry Springer, “but you got something you want to talk about? Get up! There’s the stage!”

The “stage” Springer is talking about is, collectively, his and more than a dozen other daytime, syndicated talk shows.

Whether trading on Jerry Springer’s breast fixation or Geraldo Rivera’s breast-beating machismo, on Sally Jessy Raphael’s demonic caring or Ricki Lake’s mall-rat tattle-tales, every day these talk shows and the rest draw millions of viewers, each of whom tunes in to see who’s the next one among them to go public - who’s the next one on stage.

But that isn’t all that’s going on. The talk, talk, talk about talk shows is as incessant as the talk shows themselves, and perhaps as shrill and nonproductive.

Lately, former Education Secretary William Bennett has mounted a campaign against talk shows, which he brands “cultural rot.” He has called for advertisers to boycott these shows, and for stations to stop airing them. Results so far are inconclusive.

On a more conciliatory level, a “Talk Show Summit” was held in Manhattan in October. It brought together talk-show principals with “experts” on social and health issues to discuss, rather oddly, how such shows could contribute to public health.

Was anything accomplished?

Well, talk-show host Mark Walberg, for one, hailed the closed-door session as “a constructive swapping of ideas on how to empower people with an hour of television every day,” and added, “I’m all about that.”

Since nobody seems to have gotten his message, Walberg, near the bottom of the ratings, is about to scrap his four-month-old show for a “whole new kind of talk show.” This time he promises, really-truly, to avoid the “cheap, abrasive or exploitative.”

So what? Another talk freshman, Danny Bonaduce, whose show was pitched as an “upbeat, fun alternative to the sensationalism of most daytime talkers,” has already been zotzed.

Meanwhile, the sleaziest of the veterans, including Springer and Jenny Jones, remain among the ratings champs.

Do they glorify deviant behavior? No, according to social critic Barbara Ehrenreich. In a recent Time magazine column, she defended such shows as a moral crucible where each debauched guest gets a healthy dose of shame-on-you from the host and studio audience.

But having said that, Ehrenreich leveled a different complaint: Talk shows in large part trade on “poverty and the distortions it visits on the human spirit,” she wrote. It’s “class exploitation, pure and simple.”

Sure, the unwashed masses are the stars of the show. But they have to play the fool.

On “Jenny Jones” meet newlyweds April and Tony, and Tony’s mother Evamae, who, Jenny explains, “turned the wedding day into such a disaster that the stress has caused April to have a miscarriage.”

At one point in the free-for-all that follows, Evamae rips into her daughter-in-law: “Every Tom, Dick and Harry that would take you to bed, you’d go.”

“I was raped by (Tony’s) best friend,” April tearfully explains.

And on and on with their cartoonish self-debasement.

“A talk show gives people the courage to confront what they wouldn’t have been able to confront in the privacy of their own lives,” Jenny Jones argued in an interview. “It’s a great opportunity, and sometimes, like, a last resort.”

A last resort it would have to be, restricted to people who won’t flinch at the stiff price: what’s left of their own dignity.

The primary mission of most talk shows isn’t to provide a soapbox or analyst’s couch for the guests. It’s to hook viewers. The guests and their bad manners are the bait.

In return, the guests, at long last, get to trade on their put-upon status. The tape rolls and, on cue, they shout and cry and carry on about it. They are tasting the big time. They are dupes - big-time.