Reality Therapy - talk shows - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 3, 2001 by Richard Brookhiser

Chicago is the home of the personal talk show. Phil Donahue began there; Oprah, Jenny Jones, and Jerry Springer tape there. But New York, as a national media capital, makes its own contributions to the genre.

The Montel Williams show is shot, like many other TV shows, on the West Side, among the car dealerships north of Hell's Kitchen, in a building with no pretensions. You enter a door in a plain wall, as if you were going to a consignment sale. The reception area and the green rooms occupy leftover spaces and hallways; the focus of the operation is the set. The stage has a few living-room touches-upholstered chairs, side tables. But this living room opens to a sloping bank of seats, with additional seats flanking the stage-an arena.

The host, Montel Williams, has the grace and power of a middleweight. His punches could hurt you, but he's no lumbering carcass; he can run, and he doesn't have to hide. Thirty years ago black men sported fros like the aureoles of Orthodox saints. Montel's handsome smooth head is the current thing in black hair style, and much more compelling. He is assisted by a team of producers, each one working on her own shows (most of the producers are women). They have to stay on their toes because guests cancel at the last minute, or have to be cancelled because, when they show up, their stories have suddenly changed. Even when everyone shows up and has the problems they said they have, there is no script. Three of these open-ended dramas are filmed every day. The guests on the segment I'm watching are mothers and daughters who cannot communicate with each other. They hail from the heartland- anyplace in America that doesn't produce a television show.

Montel's guests come armored in recrimination. A daughter appears and tells her story; her mother appears, with a slightly or vastly different one, and immediately the sparks fly. Montel enters these fracases like a log-splitter. A young woman, her mother, and her mother-in-law are quarreling about who should have custody of the young woman's three little boys. (The father has no say in the matter, because the young woman's husband was murdered when she was 19 years old.) Montel moves in. "There are three boys, who are hearing you three women go, yak-yak-yak-yak. If you keep this up, that is all they will think women do-and seventeen years from now, they will be on this show, for abusing their wives. And don't think I'm joking, because that will happen."

At certain moments, he will turn for help to an in-studio expert, in this case my wife. "Jeanne, Jeanne, Jeanne," he says, after eliciting some tale of horror, "what can we tell these people?" I've been doing gladiatorial TV since the Carter administration, but my expertise is limited to Communism and the GDP. Confronted with a question like this, I would gape like a bass. But Jeanne does just fine. Montel's credo is that actions have consequences, and that no good comes from being a victim. Jeanne is more used to psychoanalyses of five or ten years, but she also endorses Montel's assumptions.

The conventions of television produce weird moments in a taping. During the breaks, into which commercials will be dropped, Montel banters with members of the audience, to keep his and their energy up. This seems jarring after a 14-year-old girl has been telling about being raped for two years by her father, but then I reflect that it is also a courtesy: Would it be better to stare dumbly at the girl for two minutes? The weirdest moments arise from the guests' awareness, or lack of awareness, of being on television. One anxious young woman, in her mid twenties, who ran away from home when she was 15, tells Montel that she could never talk to her mother "like I'm talking to you, or"-she gestures, past the studio, to America-"to everyone." The 14-year-old, quiet as the shortest day in the year, murmurs that she kept her violation a secret because she didn't want to tell anyone about it. Montel reminds her, kindly but firmly, that she is telling millions of people right now.

Such moments of intimate exposure often bring personal talk shows into the realm of exhibitionism, and bring down on them the wrath of the censorious, usually writers who watch too much television. Walker Percy imagined a Donahue show on which John Calvin was a surprise guest, sputtering about the open discussion of abominations, while George W. S. Trow wondered whether life in America had come down to a choice between Geraldo Rivera and teenage Satanists. Anyone who watches Montel to gawk at freaks, however, will be disappointed, for his show is actually a latter-day version of Father Knows Best.

On Father Knows Best, the insurance executive played by Robert Young would come home every night and resolve his family's problems. The show was a gentle comedy because it assumed that all the viewers had or aspired to have such families, and that all their problems were turns in the highway of normal bourgeois life. Montel is an hourlong boot camp that assumes that none of the guests, nor many of the viewers, have a father who is more than a rapist or a murder victim, and that, as a result, many of their problems are catastrophic. Montel is a command-performance father who only comes home once. He can't solve all his studio family's problems in that framework, even with Jane Wyatts like my wife to help him, but he tries to get people's attention. His guests (whom he refers to therapists) might work on their problems after they head back to the republic, while his viewers, after they go on to the next show, might think about their problems differently. It would be nice to get that help without having to get it from TV, but that barn is open, that horse is gone.