The (Not So) Good Old Days:
Race and Sexuality on Old-Style Talk Shows
The hybrid format of the talk show makes it a difficult genre for television
scholars to analyze. It’s a vehicle for both information and entertainment, which
means it combines goals and methods that are often contradictory. One can
focus on the talk show’s chaotic form and amorality, painting a picture of the
genre as entertaining spectacle.1 Contrary to all this chaos, the talk show can
also be discussed as a genre with a coherent form and message, which is
designed to convey information, invoking populist images of the debate, the
town hall, the neighborhood, and the coffeehouse (all in Munson). So talk shows
are a bit of a paradox. If they are both entertaining spectacle and informational
vehicle, both exploitative and useful, both amoral and highly moralistic, both
chaotic and highly controlled, what conclusions can we draw about the impact
of these contradictions?
One solution most talk show critics have adopted is a chronological model
that describes the genre as devolving, from a golden era of liberal dialogue to a
current debased era of conflict-driven performances. Virtually all talk show
scholars describe an earlier period in which talk shows were fairly seriously
administered and focused on social issues, followed by a period in which they
devolved into spectacle, yelling, and violence, although they all locate this shift
in different time periods (as early as the mid-1980s and as late as the mid-1990s)
and blame different shows for bringing it about (usually Oprah Winfrey, Ricki
Lake, or Jerry Springer). In my view, this chronology minimizes the important
fact that talk shows have always contained both sides of the chaos/coffeehouse
binary. With the exception of violence, which was a later phenomenon, in earlier
shows there was always a contradiction of purpose. Providing both information
and entertainment, talk shows were always part discourse, part spectacle; and
while the exploitative and sensational elements may have been less extreme,
they were nevertheless centrally and structurally present.
Because the shows became so horrible in the 1990s, critics like to forget
that even Donahue, who is often invoked as the saintly founding father of talk
shows, was not above cross-dressing for a show on transvestites, pitting the Klan
against the Jewish Defense League, or exploiting personal tragedy for ratings.
While he was clearly more comfortable with the joumalistic/political
discussions than the personal/sensational ones, he recognized that his show
essentially tried to “sandwich the Persian Gulf in between the male strippers”
(Munson 5). Given the complexity inherent in the genre, then, apart from its
evolution over the years, any claim that talk shows are either purely chaotic or
purely informative requires a selective emphasis on only some elements from its
very large pool of characteristics. What the newer-style shows highlight, to this