Tabloid talk show
A tabloid talk show is a subgenre of the talk show genre that emphasizes controversial and sensationalistic topical subject matter. The subgenre originated in the United States and achieved peak viewership from the mid-1980s through the end of the 1990s. Airing mostly during the day and distributed mostly through television syndication, tabloid talk shows originated in the 1960s and early 1970s with series hosted by Joe Pyne, Les Crane, and Phil Donahue; the format was popularized by personal confession-filled The Oprah Winfrey Show, which debuted nationally in 1986. The format has since been emulated outside the United States, with the United Kingdom, Latin America and the Philippines all having popular shows that fit the format.
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 host invites a group of guests to discuss an emotional or provocative topic and the guests are encouraged to make public confessions and resolve their problems with on-camera "group therapy". Similar shows are popular throughout Europe.
Tabloid talk shows are sometimes described using the pejorative slang term "trash TV", particularly when producers appear to design their shows to create controversy or confrontation, as in the case of The Richard Bey Show, ''Geraldo and Jerry Springer, which focused on lurid trysts – often between family members. Vicki Abt, a professor of sociology and American studies,'' criticized tabloid TV shows, claiming that they had blurred the lines between normal and deviant behavior. The genre experienced a particular spike during the 1990s, when a large number of such shows were on the air, but which gradually gave way during the 2000s to a more universally appealing form of talk show.
History
The Les Crane Show, a network talk show that aired on ABC as part of its late-night schedule from August 1964 to February 1965, was the first talk show to follow the format. Host Les Crane would bring on controversial guests, interview them in an aggressive but fair style, and take questions from the audience. Crane was the first to interview an openly gay man on-air and frequently interviewed black celebrities, folk singers and other taboo guests; Crane was rebuffed in his efforts to interview lesbians on one of his shows. The format was designed as competition to NBC's long-running franchise, Tonight, and its hard style contrasted with Tonight's more comedic format. The show generated significant controversy and was canceled after six months, later being retooled into a lighter talk show in an effort to boost ratings. Joe Pyne, a Los Angeles-based host, also hosted a similar talk show in syndication, although the focus was more on his confrontations with guests and less on audience participation. The early years of NBC's late-night series Tomorrow with Tom Snyder covered similar tabloid topics without a studio audience, before the show took on a more celebrity-driven format when Snyder moved to New York City in 1975. In Chicago, Lee Phillip Bell occasionally addressed controversial topics within the context of her long-running talk show as early as the late 1950s, but her show did not have a studio audience.Tabloid talk shows often post a "cart" during an episode in order to recruit guests. According to Elizabeth Kolbert of The New York Times: "Almost all the talk shows, from Sally to Ricki Lake, post notices, known as 'carts,' in the middle of a show that ask viewers to call if they have, for example, 'been trying to tell a loved one that their spouse or lover is cheating', or if they're 'going crazy' because their parents have split up."
Trash TV
The subgenre is sometimes described in pejorative slang as "trash TV", particularly when the show hosts appear to design their shows to create controversy or confrontation. One of the earliest of the post-Oprah shows was Geraldo, which was oriented toward controversial guests and theatricality. As an example, one of the early show topics was titled "Men in Lace Panties and the Women Who Love Them". One 1988 episode featuring white power skinheads ended in a brawl that left host Geraldo Rivera with a broken nose. This incident led to Newsweeks characterization of his show as "Trash TV". The term was subsequently applied to tabloid talk shows at their most extreme; some hosts, such as Richard Bey and Jerry Springer, have proudly accepted the label, while other hosts, such as Jenny Jones, resent it.Richard Bey and Jerry Springer would gain reputations as the most confrontational and sexually explicit, with stories of lurid trysts – often between family members, and with stripping guests and audience members. The Richard Bey Show started this trend, and for a time, was the most graphic of the TV talk shows. For Springer, 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. Bey and Springer were different in their subject matter: Bey, which was more popular before 1996, attracted an audience similar to that of VH1, involving common themes which would be copied by The Ricki Lake Show, The Montel Williams Show, and even the more family-oriented Sally: adultery, dysfunctional families, and bad children. Bey also had booty-shaking contests and games which featured dates with an attractive woman as the prize. Both shows had numerous features on the Ku Klux Klan and racism, a shock rock exposé, and paternity tests. Bey was also the first to use sex hotlines, featured on bumpers for the show during commercial breaks/interstitials, first on WWOR, its original broadcaster, and then in national syndication, from 1995 on. Common topics on Springer were essentially the same, such as partners admitting their adultery to each other, with fights breaking out.
Walter Goodman wrote in a 1995 column :
Springer also featured women or men admitting to their partners that they were transvestites who had convinced their partners that they were a different sex, or revealing that they were pre- or post-op transsexuals. Morbidly obese babies and an 800-pound man who was unable to leave his house were also featured – with Springer and a contracted construction crew demolishing the man's wall to get him out. Violence and fights between guests became almost ritual, with Springer
Maury would go on to become one of the most enduring examples of the format, albeit less sensational. Debuting the same season as Springer and likewise initially having a more serious focus, host Maury Povich over time developed a largely formulaic series that carved out a niche: by the 2010s, Maury had become almost synonymous with adversarial DNA paternity testing and polygraph. A typical episode of Maury features a poor woman, often with a checkered sexual background, accusing a past sexual partner of being the father of her child, which the man will categorically deny. At the end of the segment, Povich dramatically reveals the results of the paternity test, and the affected parties react with strong emotion. By the 21st century, Maury had already earned a reputation as being "miles further down the commode" than Springer, and the name of the show would become a byword for dysfunctional parental situations. Maury would continue until Povich, at age 83, announced his retirement in 2022; the basic format is to be continued in a follow-up show hosted by Karamo Brown.
Rise and impact
In April 1998, Robert Lichter of a nonpartisan research group, said that there has been a "quantum leap" downward that year in terms of the public viewing vulgar language and sexuality on TV in "shocking terms". Both Jerry Springer and the adult cartoon South Park were cited as examples of TV "stretching" the "boundaries of taste". The author Ross Benes cites 1999 as "the year low culture took over the world". He has also argued, however, of "respected" cultural outputs during this period, such as The Sopranos, despite the high demand of trash TV.Controversy
On March 6, 1995, The Jenny Jones Show taped an episode titled "Revealing Same Sex Secret Crush". One of the segments featured Scott Amedure, a 32-year-old gay man, revealing his crush on acquaintance Jonathan Schmitz, a 24-year-old straight man. Schmitz reacted with laughter while on the show, but became disturbed by the incident later. Three days after the episode's taping, Schmitz went to Amedure's home and killed him by firing two shots into his chest. Schmitz was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison. Schmitz was released on parole on August 21, 2017.Amedure's family filed a negligence lawsuit against the producers of The Jenny Jones Show. The show informed Schmitz that his secret admirer could be a man or woman; however, Schmitz claimed he was intentionally led to believe that they were a woman. The trial court initially found for Amedure's family and the show was ordered to pay $25 million in damages. However, this decision was later overturned by the Michigan Court of Appeals, who held that the murder was "unforeseeable" and that the show "had no duty to anticipate and prevent the act of murder committed by Schmitz three days after leaving studio and hundreds of miles away". However, that decision was later overturned