The Talking Cure

TV Talk Shows and Women

Jane M. Shattuc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136656866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Volkskultur in der Kunst

The Talking Cure examines four nationally syndicated television talk shows-- Donahue, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Geraldo and Sally Jessy Raphael --which are primarily devoted to feminine culture and issues. Serving as one of the few public forums where working-class women and those with different sexual orientations have a voice, these talk shows represent American TV at its most radical. Shattuc examines the tension between talk's feminist politics and the television industry, who, in their need to appeal to women, trades on sensation, stereotypes and fears in order to engender product consumption. However, this genre is not a one-way form of social interaction. The female audience complies and resists in a complex give-and-take, and it is this relationship which The Talking Cure aims to understand and reveal.

1

INTRODUCTION

The Terms of the Debate about Talk Shows

Talk shows (and we are one of them) and self-help books have been blamed for turning this country into a nation of crybabies. There are a lot of critics that say that we have made it easy for weak people to come up with 101 excuses from poverty to abuse to explain why they can’t take charge of their lives…. It is my hope that all of us will take the pain that life has dealt us and use it to get to the other side.

Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey, Show, February 22, 1994

Sure, a lot of the stuff we discuss is really tasteless. Some guys infidelities can be hard to watch, embarrassing and even considered trashy. There’s a line we don’t cross. We won’t put someone on a stage to laugh at them, belittle them, make fun of them, and basically destroy their life.

Ricki Lake, quoted in “Star Talker,” Broadcasting and Cable, December 12, 1996.

Ricki—You have the most entertaining talk show on television. Oprah looks like Lawrence Welk compared to you.

Viewer, Ricki Lake Message Board, America Online, July 29, 1995

Talking Cure chronicles the cultural history of the rise and fall of a participatory form of TV devoted to the public debate of everyday issues by women: the daytime television talk show. By 1995 an average of fifteen such shows were being aired in the major U.S. TV markets. The new genre had ended the near-fifty-year reign of soap operas as the most popular daytime “dramatic” form. More important, talk had become the most watched for-women TV genre. In May 1993 the Oprah Winfrey Show attracted a greater number of women viewers than network news programs, nighttime talk shows, morning network programs, and any single daytime soap opera. More than fifteen million people were tuning in daily to watch Oprah Winfrey and her female studio audience debate personal issues with as much fury as an old-time revival meeting or the balanced-budget deliberations in the 1990s Congress.¹

By 1996 the major proponents of this kind of talk—Oprah, Geraldo, and the Phil Donahue Show—had abandoned the flourishing format because it had hit a nerve: it had produced a national controversy regarding the nature of politics, the role of tabloid culture in the U.S., the rise of a victim culture, and the exploitation of the disadvantaged for commercial gain. What was it about the format that so deeply affected Americans? Externally, the programs appeared to be throwaway mass culture as hour after repetitive hour were devoted to transsexuals, adultery, child abuse, and the like. They could make almost any sensational topic (for example, “Serial Killers Who Want To Have a Sex Change”) seem commonplace. And many Americans felt that the programs trivialized traditional politics by being staged in the style of town meetings.

In this book I argue that the public outrage emanated from the identity politics of the 1960s through the 1980s, a battle over who would define American culture and politics. New movements—civil rights, black power, feminism, gay, and lesbian—looked to the psychology of oppression as the source of inequality. They rewrote what constituted the private and public spheres of life to include consideration of how education, language, lifestyle, and representation were imbued with social consequences. In particular, feminism, through its slogan “the personal is political,” had pried open what was previously off-limits for social debate: private life. No longer was politics something to be carried on in Congress or through the electoral system. It was about what happened in the everyday experience of Americans. The Right reacted to identity politics not only by scapegoating it as “politically correct” authoritarianism but by dismantling the initiatives that had characterized post-1960s politics: affirmative action, environmental protections, and equal rights legislation. And into the fray rushed commercial TV ready to publicize this latest controversy for “the people” and exploit its potential for sensationalism by presenting private acts as socially relevant. Each daytime talk show had its own version of the politics of everyday culture, and their clash played out in the living rooms across the country.

From 1967 to 1993, TV produced some of the most radical populist moments in its history as women (and men) rarely seen on national television (lesbian, black, bisexual, working-class) stood up, spoke about, and even screamed for their beliefs about what is culturally significant. They redefined politics to reflect a practice of power in which average Americans had a measure of influence. The debate—its history, construction, psychology, and politics—is the focus of this book.

Defining the Genre

This book also addresses genre theory by analyzing how cultural history affects the conventions of an industrial entertainment form. The talk show is much more complex than its reputation as “simple” pop culture, and the daytime talk show is a subgenre of the form. The talk show is as old as American broadcasting and borrows its basic characteristics from those of nineteenth century popular culture, such as tabloids, women’s advice columns, and melodrama. Today the term talk show encompasses offerings as diverse as Larry King Live, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the 700 Club, the Tonight Show, Rush Limbaugh: The Television Show, Ricki Lake, talk radio, Good Morning America, and a host of local shows that are united by their emphasis on informal or nonscripted conversation rather than the scripted delivery of the news.

Nevertheless, the issue-oriented daytime talk show—the subject of this book—is what a majority of Americans mean when they speak of pre-1994 talk shows; that year the form started to change direction. It is distinguished from other types of talk shows by five characteristics. One, it is issue-oriented; content derives from social problems or personal matters that have a social currency such as rape, drug use, or sex change. Two, active audience participation is central. Three, it is structured around the moral authority and educated knowledge of a host and an expert, who mediate between guests and audience. Four, it is constructed for a female audience. Five, it is produced by nonnetwork companies for broadcast on network-affiliated stations. The four shows top rated by A. C. Nielsen in the 1980s, the first generation of daytime talk shows, fit these generic traits: Geraldo, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Phil Donahue Show, and Sally Jessy Raphaël. Their similarity allows their treatment as a cultural group.

Issue-oriented content differentiates daytime talk shows from other interactive TV forms, such as game shows and other talk shows. Daytime talk shows are not the news, but even at their most personal and emotional, their topics emanate from current social problems or issues. The shows can be considered as the fleshing out of the personal ramifications of a news story: the human-interest component. There needs to be a cultural conflict. Subjects are culled from current newspaper and magazine articles, and from viewer mail and call-ins. The producer decides whether a subject has opposing sides and is socially broad enough to appeal to a large audience. (In fact, local stations categorized the shows as “informational” programs on applications for license renewals in the 1980s.) At one end of the daytime talk show spectrum are programs featuring classic social policy or public sphere debates such as “Mystery Disease of the Persian Gulf War,” with army personnel (Donahue, March 23, 1994); “Press Actions on Whitewater,” with reporters (Donahue, March 16, 1994); “Strip Searching in Schools,” with school administrators (Sally Jessy Raphaël, March 14, 1994); and even “Do Talk Shows and Self-Help Movements Provide Excuses?” with lawyers and cultural critics (Oprah, February 22, 1994).

More typically, the social issue is placed in a domestic and/or personal context, such as “Arranged Marriages” (Oprah, March 10, 1994); “When Mothers Sell Babies for Drugs” (Geraldo, March 17, 1994); “Custody Battles with Your In-Laws” (Sally, April 22, 1994); and “Domestic Violence” (Donahue, February 1, 1994). Domestic social issues are often further broadened to deal with perennial behavior problems, for example, “You Are Not the Man I Married” (Geraldo, February 14, 1994); “Broken Engagements” (Oprah, January 31, 1994); “Ministers Who Seduce Ladies” (Sally, April 19, 1994); and “Jealousy” (Donahue, March 3, 1994). All such programs involve the breaking of a cultural taboo (for instance, infidelity, murder, seduction, nonprocreative sex).

Formally, the convention of audience participation also differentiates daytime talk shows from other talk shows. Spectacles are traditionally defined by separation between an active presentation on a stage and a passive viewing audience, as in Aristotelian theater, classical Hollywood films, and network drama.² The fiction is maintained through the fourth-wall convention (the imaginary wall over which we peep as a seemingly “real” drama unfolds). The role of the viewing public is effaced. Within fictional TV, sitcoms are the only genre that offers the audience a role; it is configured as the laugh track (“canned laughter”) or with the declaration “taped before a live audience.” Both function as an attempt to signal and encourage the correct viewer reaction to the fiction.

However, conventional drama is only a part of TV. As a whole TV is different from film and theater in that it is marked by what Robert Allen calls a “rhetorical mode,” wherein the viewer’s presence is often simulated through direct address.³ Advertisements and news anchors speak directly to the audience through use of the pronouns “you” or “we” as a means of cutting through the impersonal nature of TV’s mass address, as well as of creating a hierarchy address and authority. The “you” is subjected to the words and ideas of the “I” or an anonymous announcer: “It’s time for you to buy right now!”

Talk shows are marked by the active inclusion of the audience in the spectacle. The celebrity talk shows such as the Tonight Show (1954–), Late Night with David Letterman (1982–), and the old Mike Douglas Show (1962–1982) are conversations among entertainment elites about the entertainment industry. Yet audience members are frequently called by name and asked to interact with the host. Although the studio audience is seen and called upon, it still functions somewhat like a laugh track (although less predictably): as passive “inscribed viewers” whose main role is to represent the at-home viewer by following the program’s rules of good viewership. Audience members embody the immediate “you” to whom the host refers as he or she addresses the camera. They laugh and applaud—to a degree voluntarily—out of appreciation for the entertainment, but the producers attempt to bring about the sought-after emotional tenor through prompts: flashing signs or gesturing personnel.

Even when the host interacts with audience members, their response is usually limited in that they are on the receiving end of highly contrived situations. Consider Letterman and its often-repeated jape of putting an off-color title under the on-screen face of an unsuspecting person in the audience. The joke is the incongruity of the label and the resulting public embarrassment of the person. This audience interaction is only a minor warm-up to the main event: conversation between luminaries who perform and/or talk. After its brief moments of being in the limelight, the studio audience returns to its classic role as spectator.

Even with the more interactive public-affairs programs such as Larry King Live! (1985–), 700 Club (1976–), and Rush Limbaugh: The Television Show (1992–), the studio audience is a secondary element and often off-screen. Limbaugh’s audience is represented through “viewer mail.” We have no idea how edited viewer mail is or if it is from actual viewers. Larry King Live!, defined as a call-in show, offers home viewers access by telephone to the debate of the issues of the hour. They are disembodied voices; the focus remains on King and his guest authority. Each caller is allowed to make a short statement or, preferably, to direct a question to the authority.

Robert Allen argues that the daytime talk show studio audience has a stronger similarity to the game show audience than to those of other genres.⁴ Commonweal magazine calls it a “sibling” relationship.⁵ Both genres acknowledge the audience directly by equal lighting of stage and audience. The audience becomes part of the performance, just “on the other side of the screen.”⁶ It is represented as an “ideal audience” that listens respectfully and asks the questions (or guesses the answers) for the viewer at home. For all their look of spontaneity greater than those given on celebrity talk shows, the responses are still highly regulated through the host’s selections, prior coaching, and the general production process of camerawork, miking, and segmentation.

More specifically, both daytime talk shows (hereafter the definition of “talk shows”) and game shows blur the line between audience and performance. They allow the audience member to shift from characterized viewer to performer. Allen believes that many game shows depend on this change for their entertainment. He cites the example of Johnny Olsen’s famous “Come on down!” on The Price Is Right (1956–1974) as marking the audience member’s switch to participant.⁷

Perhaps no other game show comes closer to the combination of the interactive audience and emotional narratives of the talk show than Queen for a Day (1956–1962).⁸ Begun as a radio show, its TV version chose four or five women from the studio audience to appear on the stage. One by one each would state what she needed most and why. The winner, or “queen for the day,” was picked based on audience applause. Usually, the woman who told the most tearjerking story received the most applause. Queen for a Day has become emblematic of TV’s early ability to offer the common American a chance at temporary stardom or what Andy Warhol glibly proclaimed everyone’s “fifteen minutes of fame.” A number of critics are of the opinion that this social empowerment, albeit brief, is what causes the guests and audience members of talk shows to become less fearful and to disclose their personal lives on national TV⁹ The best and most emotionally told stories on talk shows continue to win the greatest attention and audience respect.

Talk shows bring about the change from audience member to performer more subtly than game shows do. Although the initial focus is the guests on stage and their topical problems, an audience member can confess similarity or differ with the presentation at any moment that the focus moves to the studio audience. The shows intentionally do not make a clear distinction between guests and audience members. Producers often ask guests with similar problems and entire groups with a vested interest in the issue to be part of the studio audience. Consider a program on drag queens on Geraldo. The audience is full of invited friends of the “queens” on stage and some who are not in sympathy with them. A physical fight breaks out in the audience because of one man’s anger at men “masquerading” as women. By taping a characterized viewer’s becoming a participant, the program hopes to create greater vicarious involvement on the part of the at-home viewer. In like fashion, the at-home viewer sides with audience members in the debate, thinking what he or she would want to ask or say to the guest. For all their supposed dependence on lurid description and unhealthy voyeurism, the talk show genre breaks through the anonymity of the audience that such peep-show comparisons necessitate. Consider how often viewers address talk shows being screened in, say, bars, waiting rooms, launderettes, or at home. The talk show is a genre predicated on active audience response, not silent and anonymous voyeurism.

Talk radio offers a set of traits similar t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION The Terms of the Debate about Talk Shows
• 2 SOBBING SISTERS The Evolution of Talk Shows
• 3 TALK IS CHEAP How the Industrial Production Process Constructs Femininity
• 4 THE “OPRAHFICATION” OF AMERICA? Identity Politics and Public Sphere Debate
• 5 FREUD vs. WOMEN The Popularization of Therapy on Daytime Talk Shows
• 6 “GO RICKI” Politics, Perversion, and Pleasure in the 1990s
• 7 CONCLUSION The Inconclusive Audience
• APPENDIX Talk Show Content (February 21 – 25, 1995)
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX