Media
McConnell, Frank
MEDIA THE CHAT SHOW FROM STEVE ALLEN TO OPRAH uring the second round of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings—you remember, when Judge Thomas was accusing the Senate Judiciary Committee of...
...a panel of guests severely constellated along the spectrum from earned fame to chosen weirdness, okay...
...The chat show began in the fifties, with Steve Allen's version of the NBC Tonight show...
...Jack Paar, in the late fifties and early sixties, turned this minor phenomenon into a major phenomenon by democratizing it further...
...Ever watch Phil or Oprah or whatever in the den with a pal or two...
...The Talk Show from Hell...
...And a lot that you might not want to hear but can't help hut hear...
...Or, better yet, a stunning demonstration of how deeply the psychology and, I'd even say, the phenomenology of the talk show has embedded itself in our perception of what it means to live in America—or even scarier, incarnates that perception...
...As the brilliant and mourned Roland Barthes once wrote, the erotic gives itself while the pornographic only shows itself...
...An audience...
...And that—and I think we'd better listen—is what the static is saying...
...Our frustration at not really encountering the people in the box...
...And then came Johnny Carson, and David Letterman, and Arsenio Hall, still all with us and still continuing the chat show 18: 14 February 1992 Commonweal dition of befuddled semi-talk with folks you may or may not Coss the Street to Meet in what we still, nostalgically, call "real life...
...A lot...
...The time when the president can score low in the polls for domestic policy and—good Lord !—high for "presidential quality...
...Celebrities, and celebrity wannabees, rushed to appear on the set with Steve and make usually inane conversation—what Steve was always best at—and America was enraptured: golly-roo, Ethel, these famous guys are just as dumb as us...
...Now that is one strong drug...
...If the talk show is TV at its most "interactive" (a good goofy sociologist's word), its final effect is to deny the interaction that is its seductive promise...
...FRANK McCONNELL Commonweal 14 February 1992: 19...
...The chat show was still missing something, at least if the chat show wanted to grow up to be the talk show...
...The age in which far less than half of our people vote for the presidency because "those politicians are all the same" anyhow...
...Except that on the Athenian and Elizabethan stage there really was a dance to join...
...What you're shown is what you get, and don't you dare ask for more...
...Steve had been snotty...
...Our impotent frustration at the fact that the Tube, for all its blandishments, is only—like dope and pornography—experience as sold to you...
...And as we watch, the Tube, as it were, spills into the den and we find ourselves becoming part of the discourse...
...You bastard...
...says Phil—or Oprah or blah blah—in the last, usually most frenzied commercial-break segment of the five-days-aweek ritual...
...A funnily-cognitively-impaired host, okay...
...An audience that not only watched and listened to the blather but that responded to it, challenged it, insulted or supported the guests on the dais and, optimally, started quarreling with one another as well as with the guests...
...Yes...
...But what messages does the signal carry besides the explicit, up-front, articulated ones...
...But peace be upon Carson and his clones...
...Like dope and porn, in other words, it is the merchandising of infinitely deferred fulfillment...
...These are, scout's honor, comments I have heard, addressed to a television set by a dear friend of mine who shall be nameless and I'm married to...
...And what the hell is the static saying...
...MEDIA THE CHAT SHOW FROM STEVE ALLEN TO OPRAH uring the second round of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings—you remember, when Judge Thomas was accusing the Senate Judiciary Committee of being racist and Alan Simpson, the Freddie Krueger of jurisprudence, was accusing Professor Anita Hill of being a psychotic liar—a cartoon by the brilliant Jeff MacNelly appeared in which the Judiciary Committee was peopled by characters with the nameplates "Phil," "Oprah," and "Sally Jesse," and one of them was asking, "And who's our next witness, Geraldo...
...You can't send a message, after all, without "white noise" or static: it's what opens the chanelfor the mesage, hum of stereo, the random flecks light on the TV screen, like that...
...The talk show, first of all, is like its sibling, the game show, a virtually fail-safe concept for the Tube: cheap sets, blessedly low production costs, and a solid hour of signal...
...In each case it's an invitation to the dance, and dance, to be sure, we do...
...Except that the "fulfillment" in this case is the sense of the human community itself...
...Where Steve Allen had been a multitalented mediocrity, Paar was a mediocrity pure and simple (heavy on the simple): his vulnerability and more or less permanent off-the-pointness wasn't just part of his charm, it was the key center—as in, "let's play blues in A-Minor"—of his aura...
...Our inevitable isolation as spectators and not concelebrants of what we had thought was a dialogue...
...You were there, and at the end of the performance the community—the real reason for the drama in the first place—was renewed and reaffirmed as players, chorus, and watchers all together left the theater to go back into the life of the commonwealth they had just, magically, sacramentalized...
...How can you say that...
...what could be missing here...
...And it's an accident, you want to tell me, that this phenomenon becomes a phenomenon in the era of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, the politics of the sound-byte, and war as a video game...
...Or is it...
...And isn't that a précis of our societal malaise...
...And this happens because, of course, the audience of Just Plain Folks on the screen—or is it in the box?—who are hollering at the mythic figures on the stage (011ie North or transvestite vegetarian Nazis, makes no difference, they're on stage so they're mythic), that audience is the psychic surrogate of the audience in the den...
...It was a gag that carried the shock of what the Japanese call satori, instantaneous clarification: of course that's what the Thomas/Hill mischegas (Yiddish for "mess") had been...
...It may be the only kind of TV where viewers talk to the screen...
...And just what is reaffirmed at the end of an afternoon with Oprah...
...Good for you...
...Emotionally, it's 3-D television...
...Jack was wimpy: we liked Jack even better...
...The Tube talk show—as manifested in the Big Four of Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, and Sally Jesse—is an outgrowth or maybe a mutation of something that's been around for much longer, the chat show...
...The responding audience, which by me is essential to the talk show in its fully formed state, plays essentially the same role as the Chorus in Greek tragedy or the clowns in Shakespeare: to mediate between the high drama we behold (Oedipus, Othello, 011ie) and the everyday world from which we behold it...
...Caller...
...These are my terms, so I'll explain...
...And that's why Phil, Oprah, Sally, Geraldo, and their brood—good souls all, 1 have no doubt—are, in their way, mimes (like the dumb show preceding the play-within-the-play in Hamlet) of the progressive decay of the will to act for the public good in our New World Order...
...Give us your applause," say the clowns at the end of a remarkable number of the Bard's comedies...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
