The talking cure : TV talk shows and women /

Shattuc (Emerson College) defines talk shows as nonscripted conversations, with active participation by carefully selected studio audiences, knowledgeable host experts mediating between guests and audience, and a largely female viewership. Her chapters on the precursors and evolution of talk shows, the production processes, and scheduling strategies are valuable background to her detailed analysis of Oprah, Geraldo, Ricki Lake, and others. Using many examples, Shattuc demonstrates that the talk show subjects must have built-in conflict and broadly domestic and personal appeal, occasionally including public policy issues. She explores both standard structures and newer variants. She is forthright about the nature and pleasures of the genre--its intimacy, stereotypes reinforced yet subject to multiple narrative shifts and deconstructions, the pleasure of seeing women speak out, the backlash against "social-do gooders," the extremes experienced by seemingly ordinary people, the David and Goliath archetypes, the conflict of liberal cultural and reactionary political populism, the many tropes on self-esteem, the investigative reports. She also thoroughly and perceptively discusses how various audiences are constructed, why people consent to be guests, and the self-referential or parodic (often self-limiting) elements characteristic of the genre in late 1990s. Strongly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through professionals. M. J. Miller; Brock University

Whether you see Jenny Jones--alleged accessory to the murder of a man who had appeared on her talk show--sympathetically or as another shallow media buffoon, take a look at Shattuc's examination of the TV talk show world. Shattuc might have settled for just a howlingly funny book, full of the day-time talk show fare (themes like "lesbian nuns in love with their grocers" and spectacles like Geraldo Rivera getting his nose broken during an on-screen fracas) that stand-up comics have made staples of late-night talk show mirth. But Shattuc eschews cheap shots and easy laughs in favor of content analysis and a chronicling of "the rise and fall of a participatory form of TV devoted to the public debate of everyday issues by women." In comparing the individual shows by approach, content, and audience, Shattuc offers the means to understand an often confusing or disturbing trend in popular taste. Perhaps next she will look at talk radio, the masculine counterpart to her subject here. (Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1997)0415910870Mike Tribby

By 1995, 15 daytime talk shows were aired in major U.S. TV markets, ending the 50-year reign of soap operas as the most popular daytime program format. In this cultural history, Shattuc distinguishes issue-oriented daytime talk shows from other talk shows: aimed at a female audience, these shows are produced by non-network companies for broadcast on network-affiliated stations. Trying to spur active audience participation, the hosts, sometimes with the help of "experts," mediate between guests and audiences on current social issues. Comparing 1994 TV themes with news of "crime and the uncommon" in Joseph Pulitzer's 1884 New York World, Shattuc traces the talk show's evolution from the 1950s late-night celebrity talk format and 1960s daytime celebrity talk shows to the National Enquirer and the "circuslike display" seen on more recent shows, which she describes as "part narrative melodrama and part public affairs." Daytime TV talk shows are allowed a "degree of tawdriness" not found on prime time, and they emphasize class inequities, defending "the little guy" against the reigning power. They provide, says Shattuc, a discourse, a debate for the disenfranchised. The book is structured to carry the reader through every aspect: authenticity, use of actors, the production process, topics and issues (feminism, race, gays), advertising, ratings and controversial confrontational tactics (the "ambush disclosure"), concluding with a look at messages found online in computer bulletin board debates. Nothing is omitted from this exhaustive, much-needed study, the result of numerous interviews and research over a four-year period, involving 240 hours of talk shows, hundreds of questionnaires and exploration of the Museum of Television & Radio archives. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved