Tabloid talk show
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Tabloid talk shows are a genre of American television talk-shows that achieved peak viewership during the late 20th century, ran mostly during the day, and were distributed mostly through syndication. The genre is believed to have originated with Phil Donahue and the increased viewership and personal confessions of Oprah Winfrey are believed to have popularized[1] and revolutionized it.[2][3] Tabloid talk shows have sometimes been described as the freak shows of the late 20th century since most of their guests were outside the mainstream. The distinguishing features of these shows is a host that wanders through the studio audience getting opinions from everyday people seated to watch the show, and shows focused on a topic of the day that is often seen as provocative and explored through public confessions and a focus on "group therapy".
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[edit] History
The origins of the tabloid talk show format have been traced to 1970 with Phil Donahue, as host of The Phil Donahue Show. Although Donahue's show originally started off as a show similar to the others of its day, he soon began to push the envelope with the discussion of topics deemed to be taboo such as atheism, anatomically correct naked dolls, and homosexuality. Donahue also distinguished himself from traditional talk shows by being the first to get off the stage, and take his microphone directly into the studio audience.
For over a decade, Donahue's was the only show of this kind, and so tabloid talk shows had not yet been described as a genre, lucrative industry, or counterculture movement. All of that changed in 1986 when a relatively unknown 32 year old woman named Oprah Winfrey became the first broadcaster able to challenge Donahue in the ratings. Winfrey's show quickly doubled Donahue's audience as her personal confessions and focus on therapy were seen by many as redefining the format.
Time magazine wrote, "Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah's eye....They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session."
By confessing intimate details about her weight problems, tumultuous love life, and sexual abuse, and crying along side her guests, Time Magazine credits Winfrey with creating a new form of media communication known as "rapport talk" as distinguished from the "report talk" of Phil Donahue:
"Winfrey saw television's power to blend public and private; while it links strangers and conveys information over public airwaves, TV is most often viewed in the privacy of our homes. Like a family member, it sits down to meals with us and talks to us in the lonely afternoons. Grasping this paradox, ...She makes people care because she cares. That is Winfrey's genius, and will be her legacy, as the changes she has wrought in the talk show continue to permeate our culture and shape our lives."[4]
Winfrey continued Donahue's pattern of exploring topics that were at the time considered taboo. For an entire hour in the 1980s, members of the studio audience stood up one by one, gave their name and announced that they were gay. Also in the 1980s Winfrey took her show to West Virginia to confront a town gripped by AIDS paranoia because a gay man living in the town had HIV. Winfrey interviewed the man who had become a social outcast, the town's mayor who drained the swimming pool because the man had gone swimming, and debated the town's hostile residents. "But I hear this is a God fearing town" Winfrey scolded the homophobic studio audience, "where's all that Christian love and understanding?" During a show on gay marriage in the 1990s, a woman in Winfrey's audience stood up to complain that gays were constantly flaunting their sex lives and she announced that she was tired of it. "You know what I'm tired of," replied Winfrey, "heterosexual males raping and sodomizing young girls. That's what I'm tired of." Her rebuttal inspired a screaming standing ovation from that show's mostly gay studio audience.
Guests included Neo Nazis, polygamous men and their partners, and Black and Jewish activists. By the fourth season, a show was dedicated to guests who claimed they had seen Elvis Presley alive in a variety of different locations throughout the country, with one man revealing to the host that he talked to the singer in his local Burger King.
Oprah's best friend, the former news anchor and talk show host Gayle King said during an A&E profile on Winfrey in 2003 that when they recently looked back at an episode list of the first six seasons, Oprah could not believe she used to host such provocative shows. With titles such as "I'm a Cross-Dresser" and "Priestly Sins", King believed the topics "didn't seem so sleazy" when Oprah did them.
[edit] Coming after Oprah
Soon many imitators began to appear, and by the time word spread that Winfrey had negotiated the most lucrative deal in television (a deal that would eventually make her the richest African American of the 20th century and the world's only black billionaire for three straight years), the industry exploded with copycats, each competing to be more edgy and provocative than the one before. In 1991, Jerry Springer debuted The Jerry Springer Show, Jenny Jones debuted The Jenny Jones Show, Maury Povich debuted The Maury Povich Show, and Montel Williams debuted The Montel Williams Show. In 1993, Ricki Lake debuted her own show. With the abundance of these new shows, each of them was forced to compete with each other for higher ratings and higher ad revenues. This led the shows to topics considered outrageous in an attempt to keep viewers tuned in.
One of the earliest of the post-Oprah shows was Geraldo, which was oriented toward controversial guests and theatricality - one of the early shows was titled "Men in Lace Panties and the Women Who Love Them". Geraldo Rivera's nose was broken in a well-publicized brawl during a 1988 show, involving racist skinheads, anti-racist skinheads, and black and Jewish activists.[5] This incident led to Newsweek's characterization of his show as "Trash TV".
In 1987, Rivera hosted the first of a series of special reports in prime time dealing with an alleged epidemic of Satanic ritual abuse. He stated: "Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country ... The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual sexual child abuse, child pornography and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town." Subsequent to the programs, there were outbreaks of Satanic hysteria in various American cities.
He was noted for self-promotion and for inserting himself into stories: he twice had plastic surgery on his program, and his autobiography Exposing Myself caused headlines in 1991 by discussing his sexual dalliances, which included encounters with Bette Midler and Margaret Trudeau. He was the son-in-law of author Kurt Vonnegut, while married to Edith Vonnegut.
Ricki Lake hit the scene as the youngest talk show host in the genre, and her show targeted a young and urban demographic. A typical show might present several lower middle class women, each claiming to be "All that" (the show's catchphrase for someone with high fashion, personality, and sex appeal), with others debating the assertion. Other shows would present someone in an obviously bad relationship and have Lake recommend, "Dump that zero and get yoself a hero." Once Lake became a mother, family oriented shows became more common.
Lake's talk show was a frequent target for satire. It was repeatedly parodied during the 1990s on Saturday Night Live, with male cast member Jay Mohr impersonating Lake in drag. The show was also parodied fleetingly on Family Guy where a guest on the show was quoted to have said, "Yo, Ricki, that's my girlfriend. She ain't supposed to be havin' no penis!". In addition, Lakes's show was referenced in the chorus of the hit 1998 song "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)" by The Offspring: "So if you don't rate, just overcompensate, at least you know you can always go on Ricki Lake."
The The Jerry Springer Show would gain a reputation as the most confrontational and sexually explicit, with stories of lurid trysts - often between family members, and with stripping guests and audience members. Although the show started as a politically-oriented talk show, the search for higher ratings in an extremely competitive market led Springer to topics often described as tawdry and provocative, increasing its viewership in the process. Topics included partners admitting their adultery to each other, women or men admitting to their partners that they were post-op-transexuals, paternity test shows, numerous features on the Ku Klux Klan and other hate based groups, and an exposee of shock rock featuring El Duce from The Mentors and an appearance from GWAR. By this point, the hostility and simmering violence had been turned into a ritual. Fueding family members would come out on stage, wigs invariably got knocked loose and clothing got torn, but stage security guard Steve would separate the combatants before the action got too violent.
Though frequently criticized, Springer claimed that he had no creative control over the guests. If they were making up their story just to get their 15 minutes of fame, he and his producers knew nothing about it. He even dedicated a portion of one of his shows to showing outtakes, in which he caught a lesbian couple lying about their affair.
By the early 2000s, the genre began to decline in popularity with viewing audiences, and certain hosts either saw their shows cancelled due to low ratings (i.e. Jenny Jones and Sally Jesse Raphaël) or voluntarily ended their shows to pursue other interests, such as Ricki Lake. Many media analysts have attributed the decline in popularity of tabloid talk shows and daytime talk in general to competition from cable as well as the presumption that viewers were tiring of the constant recycling of subjects that are often shown on such programs. Another explanation would be that the same audience shifted directly over to the new "Reality" TV genre that rose to prominence at around the same time. As early as the late 1990s, hosts such as Oprah Winfrey, and to a lesser extent Montel Williams, began to distance their programs from the genre by refocusing them to more serious subject matters or staying onstage like more traditional talk shows. Another example of this trend was Geraldo Rivera ending his show in 1998 to focus on his CNBC News program full time.
The Phil Donahue Show, seen by many as originating the genre, was cancelled in 1996 when it could not compete with the new crop of shows. Donahue and Rivera would attempt to re-establish their journalistic credentials on cable television: Donahue with a short-lived talk show on MSNBC, and Rivera filing reports on CNBC, NBC, and Fox News Channel. Maury Povich began hosting a weekend news show in 2006 with wife Connie Chung on MSNBC while still hosting his daytime show. Weekends with Maury and Connie was cancelled after six months, due to low ratings and being panned by many of the same critics who criticized his daytime talk show. Jerry Springer, while continuing to host his televised "freak show", also hosts a more serious talk show on Air America radio.
[edit] Influence
In the scholarly text Freaks Talk Back[6], Yale sociology professor Joshua Gamson credits the tabloid talk show genre with providing much needed high impact media visibility for gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgender people and doing more to make them mainstream and socially acceptable than any other development of the 20th century. In the book's editorial review Michael Bronski wrote "In the recent past, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people had almost no presence on television. With the invention and propagation of tabloid talk shows such as Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Oprah, and Geraldo, people outside the sexual mainstream now appear in living rooms across America almost every day of the week."[7]
Following the success of tabloid talk shows, early 21st century gays were coming out of the closet younger and younger, gay suicide rates had dropped, and gays were embraced on mainstream shows like Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and films like Brokeback Mountain. While having changed with the times from her tabloid talk show roots, Winfrey continues to empower the gay community by using her show to promote openly gay personalities like her hairdresser, makeup artist, and decorator Nate Berkus who inspired an outpouring of sympathy from middle America after grieving the loss of his partner in the Tsunami on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey's intimate therapeutic hosting style and the tabloid talk show genre she popularized has been credited or blamed for leading the media counterculture of the 1980s and 1990s which broke 20th century taboos, led to America's self-help obsession, and created confession culture. The Wall Street Journal coined the term Oprahfication which means public confession as a form of therapy.
Sociologist Vicki Abt criticised tabloid talk shows for redefining social norms. In her book Coming After Oprah: Cultural Fallout in the Age of the TV talk show, Abt warned that the media revolution that followed Oprah's success was blurring the lines between normal and deviant behavior.
Talk shows were often spoofed in mainstream media, with Night Stand with Dick Dietrick one of the full length spoofs of the medium (complete with fake guests and audience members asking questions).
[edit] Controversy
On an episode of The Jenny Jones Show called "Same-Sex Secret Crushes" taped on March 6, 1995, a gay man named Scott Amedure confessed his love for his friend, Jonathan Schmitz. Schmitz reacted with laughter while on the show, but became disturbed by the incident later. He had a history of mental illness and alcohol/drug abuse. Three days after the show's taping, Schmitz killed Amedure. Schmitz was later convicted of second degree murder and received 25-50 years in prison. The episode was never aired.
Amedure's family then sued the producers of The Jenny Jones Show saying they should have known about Schmitz's mental illness history. In interviews, Jones said her producers told Schmitz that his admirer could be a male, but Schmitz maintained they misled him into thinking it would be a woman. While under oath, Jones admitted that the show didn't want Schmitz to know that his admirer was a man. Amedure's family won the initial ruling and the show was ordered to pay them $25 million. The verdict was later overturned by the Michigan appellate court. The case is now studied in law school tort classes because of the legal significance of saying the show's producers were not responsible for guests' safety after they had left the studio.
Ratings for the Jenny Jones show declined in the years after the case and it was cancelled in 2003.
[edit] Oprah talks to Phil Donahue
For the September 2002 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine Oprah Winfrey interviewed Phil Donahue at his Manhattan Penthouse in what she described as a "full-circle" moment. "If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey show," she wrote in the article's introduction. "He was the first to acknowledge that women are interested in more than masscara tips and cake recipes-that we're intelligent, we're concerned about the world around us, and we want the best possible lives for ourselves."
In the interview Donahue explained that "the show became a place where women discussed issues that didn't naturally come up, and certainly not in mixed company. Much of what we talked about on the air is what women had been talking about in ladies' rooms." Donahue recalled that he finally had to do a show about Doctors who hate Donahue because for the first time women were challenging their physicians.
Donahue also discussed how hosting the show helped him overcome his own taboos. "I put a gay guy on in 1968-a real live homosexual sitting right next to me. I was terrified...I'm from Notre Dame. And believe me that's the one thing you didn't want to be doing at Notre Dame was hangin' with gay people...If you don't understand those feelings than you don't understand homophobia. There's a reason for the closet. As the years went by after that show, I got involved in gay politics, and through my activism, I began to realize what it must be like to be born, to live, and to die in the closet."
Donahue also commented on the new crop of tabloid talk shows:
"I'm watching Jenny Jones-'One-Night Stand Reunions. First guest comes out...She says 'It was the most passionate, intimate, exciting night I've had in my life' The audience goes 'Oooh!' By now I'm canceling appointments to watch this, and Jenny Jones says 'Would you like to meet him?' The audience says, 'Yeah!' I thought, Me too...when they introduce the guy, he's 6 foot 4, he's gorgeous-and he's black. The audience goes, 'Whoooa!' And I thought, Well, shit-we never thought of that!"
When Winfrey reminded him "You started all this" he replied, "If that's what you think, I'm proud. What I'm most proud of is that we involved the audience more than anybody else in the game. People who owned the airwaves got to use them in this wild thing called democracy."
While both Winfrey and Donahue admitted to having done shows that were "naughty" both wondered if newer shows like Jerry Springer had crossed over into a whole different territory.
Reflecting on the genre as a whole Donahue added "If you want to know about America's culture in the last half of the 20th century, watch some of these programs."
[edit] List of tabloid talk shows
- Geraldo (1987 - 1998), hosted by Geraldo Rivera, a.k.a. The Geraldo Rivera Show
- Jenny Jones (1991 - 2003), hosted by Jenny Jones (presenter)
- The Jerry Springer Show (1991 - Present), hosted by Jerry Springer
- Maury (1991 - Present), hosted by Maury Povich, a.k.a. The Maury Povich Show
- The Montel Williams Show (1991 - Present), hosted by Montel Williams
- The Morton Downey, Jr. Show (1987-1989), hosted by Morton Downey, Jr.
- The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986 - Present), hosted by Oprah Winfrey, a.k.a. Oprah Shows produced from the late 1990s onward are more toned down than earlier shows.
- The Phil Donahue Show (1970 - 1996), hosted by Phil Donahue, a.k.a. Donahue
- Ricki Lake (1993 - 2004), hosted by Ricki Lake
- Sally Jesse Raphael (1985 - 2002, hosted by Sally Jesse Raphael, a.k.a. Sally
