Talking Trash

The Cultural Politics of Daytime TV Talk Shows

Julie Manga

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814761298
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

When The Phil Donahue Show topped the ratings in 1979, it ushered in a new era in daytime television. Mixing controversial social issues, light topics, and audience participation, it created a new genre, one that is still flourishing, despite being harshly criticized, over two decades later. Now, the daytime TV landscape is littered with talk shows. But why do people watch these shows? How do they make sense of them? And how do these shows affect their viewers' sense of what constitutes appropriate public debate?

In Talking Trash, Julie Engel Manga offers a fascinating exploration of these questions and reveals the wide range of reasons viewers are drawn to “trash talk.” Focusing on such shows as Oprah!, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, and Maury Povitch, and drawing upon interviews with women who watch these shows, Talking Trash is the first examination of the talk show phenomenon from the viewers’ perspective. In taking this approach, Manga is able to understand what talk shows mean to the women who watch them. And by refusing to judge either the shows or their viewers as good or bad, she is able to grasp how viewers relate to these shows-as escape, entertainment, uninhibited public discourse, or an accurate reflection of their own hardships and heartaches. Manga concludes that while the form of “trash-talk” shows may be relatively new, the socio-cultural experience they embody has been with us for a long time.

Absorbing, entertaining, and keenly perceptive, Talking Trash illuminates the complex viewer response to “trash talk” and examines the cultural politics surrounding this wildly controversial popular phenomenon.

1. TALK SHOWS, PUBLIC DISCOURSE, AND CULTURAL POLITICS

Television Talk Shows as Contentious Culture

The objects of our criticism are not close calls. They are shows that typically cross way over the line. We have described their contents as cultural rot. How else could one describe shows whose typical subjects include a 17-year-old girl boasting of having slept with more than 100 men, a 13- year-old girl talking about sexual experiences that began when she was 10, or “Women Who Marry Their Rapists”? (Bennett 1996: B9)

The talk show can be seen as a terrain of struggle of discursive practice … because of the nature of the format … What is conceived as confrontational devices become an opening for the empowerment of an alternative discursive practice. These discourses do not have to conform to the dictates of civility or the general interest. They can be expressed for what they are: particular, regional, one-sided, and for that reason politically alive. Few other shows on television today can make that claim.

(Carpignano et al. 1993: 116)

“Alternative discursive practice,” “cultural rot,” something else entirely, or many things at once? Why is it that certain television talk shows are so controversial? Why do those who criticize these shows consistently seem to have such strongly felt, often morally tinged opinions about them? Why, on the other hand, do millions of people watch these shows daily?¹ And, who, if anyone, takes these shows seriously? This genre has become so pervasive that the Bush campaign lobbied for a talk show format for one of the three debates sponsored by the U.S. Presidential Debate Commission during the 2000 presidential elections. In the previous election, Elizabeth Dole used a talk show format in introducing her husband, Bob Dole, as a Republican presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention. Microphone in hand, she moved around the audience, soliciting testimonials of personal experiences with Bob (all attesting to his exemplary character) from selected individuals in the audience. Furthermore, as various congressional representatives confessed to their own past infidelities during the unfolding of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair leading to President Clinton’s impeachment in December 1998, a Boston Globe article cited a University of Virginia political scientist as commenting, “I’m worried that we’re going to have an interminable national Jerry Springer Show” (Fick 1998: A21). On his late-night show Vibe, Sinbad did a talk show spoof of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, featuring actors playing Bill and Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky as guests. These examples provide evidence that the talk show form has entered mainstream cultural sensibility as a paradigm for making sense of things: the privileging of the personal experience or testimonial of ordinary people over professional expertise as a way of framing issues. At its extreme, this sensibility emphasizes the outrageous, bizarre, unbelievable, and sensational: sex, sordid relationships, adultery, and other assorted betrayals. Like other popular cultural forms such as soap operas, for example, talk shows are trivialized and devalued and, in some cases, considered damaging.

The shows I examine in this study are those commonly referred to as “trash talk” in popular and television industry discourse. This category includes the shows Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich, Montel Williams, and Sally Jessy Raphael, all of which share the distinction of being on various lists of “the worst” talk shows. This type of talk show is distinct from other television genres in that while all television genres feature talk, the talk is generally scripted dialogue among actors (e.g., sitcoms, soap operas) or dialogue, monologue, interviews, or commentary by experts or celebrities (e.g., newscasts, public affairs shows, sportscasts, late-night shows, morning “magazine” format shows). In contrast, the talk shows that are the focus of this study are live (taped for broadcast), at least seemingly unscripted interactions among guests, host, and studio audience members. These shows generally feature guests who are apparently “ordinary” people, albeit often with issues or problems that would be considered extraordinary by most. In addition, all feature studio audiences whose members have the opportunity to interact with the guests. Not only do they feature a mostly female viewership, but some of the shows have a viewership that is skewed toward black, Latino, working-class, or lower-income viewers.²

I study talk shows as a matter of culture. Any attempt to sort out what talk shows “are” entails an examination of the competing explanations through which individuals make sense of them, an issue of cultural intelligibility. However, these varying explanations do not necessarily peacefully coexist in society. Rather, it is generally the case (as it is for talk shows) that competing explanations vie for acceptance as mainstream common sense. This becomes, then, not just an issue of cultural intelligibility, but of cultural politics. As particular explanations categorize cultural forms along a hierarchy of more or less value, those using these explanations attempt to determine the extent to which a form is regarded as “legitimate.” Making determinations of value and legitimacy is an implicitly, if not often explicitly, political process. That is to say, some groups’ understanding of what is more or less valued or “legitimate” prevails over others’. This compels one to ask whose terms for legitimacy prevail in a particular social context or setting.

Herman Gray suggests that “media and popular culture are the cultural and social sites where theoretical abstraction and cultural representations come down to earth, percolating through the imagination of America” (Gray 1995: 35). While Gray makes this statement in the context of his discussion of the new right and African Americans’ claims on representations of race and “the sign of blackness,” I suggest that his insight is more broadly applicable. Popular culture and mass media forms can be studied as key “expressive sites and vehicles” (Gray 1995: 35) through which a range of issues facing society are expressed and engaged, and through which claims to legitimacy are contested and sorted out.

Before I introduce the substantive and theoretical issues central to this study, let me recount how I came to study talk shows, since this is directly connected to the issues of cultural intelligibility and legitimacy that I raise. I didn’t start out with the intention to study talk shows. I began with an interest in the intersections of public discourse, public life, and culture. Reading Habermas (1991), Fraser (1994), Young (1990), Ryan (1992), Sennett (1992), Dewey (1991), Putnam (1995), and others who are concerned with the historical and contemporary construction of the public sphere and public life, more generally, I wanted to study how people located themselves in relation to public life and public discourse and how or if they participated therein. This interest took an unexpected turn one night as I was working out on my NordicTrack in the living room of my home. While I worked out, I usually liked to watch what I call “mindless TV.” That night, as I flipped through the channels with the remote, I happened upon the Ricki Lake Show. I had heard about this type of talk show, but had previously only glanced at several.³ My initial reaction “I can’t believe this is on TV!” gave way to fascination as I found myself compelled to keep watching. At some point (I think during a commercial break), noticing that I continued to give the show my rapt attention, I became privately embarrassed that I could get so hooked by it. I found this rather multilayered reaction of disgust/fascination/embarrassment intriguing. Having discovered these shows for myself, I began informally asking other people I knew what they thought of them. The responses I got were consistently similar to my own initial reaction: “I can’t believe they show that on TV!” or “What trash!”

Spurred on by my own complicated response and the consistency of the responses among most people with whom I spoke who were much like me (mostly white, middle to upper middle class and well educated), I became interested in finding out a bit more about this popular and contentious cultural form. My research found that the most popular of these shows (at the time Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer) were each watched by approximately four to 5 million viewers every Monday through Friday (Nielsen Media Research 1996). Furthermore, approximately 80 percent of the viewing audience were female, skewed toward women between the ages of 18 to 35 with low income and lower levels of education. In addition, while in raw numbers the audience was predominantly white women, black women watched at three times the rate of white women (Nielsen Media Research 1996).

While talk shows are a contemporary televisual form, my familiarity with popular-culture analyses led me to suspect that the kind of controversy that surrounds these shows was not historically unique. Supportive professors and fellow graduate students guided me to several works of social and cultural history. Key among these were Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986, a study tracking the “carnivalesque” across a range of European literary and social contexts), Allen’s Horrible Prettiness (1991, a study of “intelligibility” of burlesque in the United States), Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988, a study of the emergence of high culture from popular culture forms in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will (1983, a study of working-class leisure practices in a New England city in the late nineteenth century), Ventura’s “Hear That Long Snake Moan” (an essay on rock-and-roll in the United States), and Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements (1986, a study of the leisure practices of young working women in the early twentieth century). All confirmed my hunch that while the form of talk shows is unique, the social phenomenon it embodies is not. This allowed me to situate talk shows historically as a cultural form.

I was struck by three factors that seemed to be consistent both in the talk shows and in these earlier popular-culture forms. In each case, the form was associated with the lower classes, women, or other marginalized groups in society. In addition, the various forms and practices all embodied similar characteristics. They were rowdy, boisterous, and otherwise hyperexpressive and collective, often involving the body, sex, or sexuality. Third, in each case, the dominant (bourgeois) class of the time responded to the form or practice with repugnance, disgust, or moral outrage, devaluing it, often regarding it as “dangerous,” and making efforts to either contain or eliminate it from the mainstream of society. This was the case, for example, with European fairs and carnivals (Stallybrass and White 1986) and with saloons (Rosenzweig 1983), burlesque (Allen 1991), popular theater and opera (Levine 1988), as well as with voodoo spiritual practices of slaves in the American South involving music and dance (Ventura 1985). The rhetoric of critics of these earlier forms and of contemporary talk shows was strikingly similar. At this point, I was convinced that I was onto something that was both intellectually interesting and potentially useful in terms of understanding the workings of culture and cultural classifications as they relate to what gets construed as “legitimate” and appropriately “public” in a society.

I study talk shows, then, as a site of “contentious culture,” more specifically as an explicitly discursive contentious cultural form. It is this second aspect that most attracted me to study the shows. I argue that talk shows can be considered, if not a site of “public discourse” in the orthodox sense, at least a site for very (if not radically) public talk.⁴ In fact, while the overarching question guiding my inquiry was, “How do people who watch talk shows make sense of them?,” my initial question was, “Who, if anyone, engages with these shows as legitimate public discourse?”

Other Studies of Television Talk Shows

While there has been scholarly study and popular commentary about television talk shows, to date, people who actually watch the shows are interviewed in only three studies. A number of studies focus on the development of talk shows or their content, making claims about what the shows “are” or the possibilities they represent, taking a range of positions. Munson (1993) provides an account of the history of the development of the contemporary talk show, showing how it emerged as a form of radio and television programming. He suggests that talk shows are both a “utopian fusion of the human, the social, and the technological in a rhetorical mastery—and a democratic scaling down—of technology that puts even political ‘outsiders’ in,” as well as “a dystopian place where problems come to light and one can hear America snarling,” “a new public sphere,” “one of the new cyberspatial neighborhoods we now live in” (Munson 1993: 155).

Abt and Mustazza (1997) and Abt and Seesholtz (1994) examine the institutional practices within which talk shows are produced and distributed. Writing firmly and unreflexively from a mainstream position, they condemn the shows as “toxic talk” (Abt and Mustazza 1997: 6). Heaton and Wilson, both of whom are mental health professionals, contend that “in their current form, talk shows contribute to, and even create more problems than they solve” and provide viewers with suggestions for being more reflexive about their talk show viewing (Heaton and Wilson 1995: 4). Masciarotte (1991) analyzes Oprah Winfrey and the now defunct Donahue. Characterizing Donahue as privileging a male discourse of rationality and reason, always working to achieve closure or provide solutions, she positions the Oprah Winfrey show, as it existed in the early 1990s, as an oppositional discursive form. Masciarotte argues that Winfrey and her show’s mode of discourse emphasize the rich display of narrative in its entire nuance and difference, with less commitment to arriving at consensus and solutions.⁵ Carpignano et al. (1993) suggest that the talk show is a form that privileges neither rational-critical debate nor experts. Rather, in featuring “ordinary” people and privileging their experience and particularistic talk, they suggest that the shows constitute the potential for an “alternative discursive” practice.

Priest (1995) conducted a study in which she interviewed people who appeared as guests on the shows. Among those who interviewed talk show viewers, Livingstone and Lunt (1994) spoke with sixteen viewers as part of their British study, which examined what in the United States would be categorized “public affairs” programming, focusing on the possibility that these shows serve as a “public sphere” of debate. Shattuc (1997) argues that talk shows have their origins in the identity politics of the 1960s. Her analysis focuses on pre-1994 shows, the generation of talk shows just prior to those that are the focus of this study. While she primarily conducts historical and content analysis, she did interview four viewers, most of whom did not represent the “target” demographics of the shows on which I focus, thereby rendering this aspect of her study inconclusive. Gamson (1998) conducted focus groups of viewers as part of his study of talk shows. He focused on the relationship of the shows to sex and gender nonconformity. In particular, he emphasized the way in which the shows routinely make sex and gender nonconformity public and visible, serving to exploit marginalized groups, but also serving to normalize them in some ways.

The Focus of the Study: How Viewers Make Sense of the Shows

The focus of my study is squarely on how viewers make sense of the shows. I did not begin with the intent to either condemn or valorize the shows. Being interested in understanding how culture operates, I am as suspicious of simplistic, morally tinged condemnation as I am of quick valorization of “the popular” or “the marginalized.” It is because the shows’ are so fundamentally constituted by talk among at least purportedly “ordinary” people rather than experts or celebrities that I was attracted to them (as opposed to an equally outrageous form like World Wrestling Federation, for example).

Because so much thorough work has already been done by others in analyzing the content and form of the shows from a number of perspectives, I focus on how viewers make sense of these shows. I do this primarily through interviews with thirty women who watch talk shows on a regular basis.⁶ Following Brunsdon, who, in the face of scholarly emphasis on audience reception in the past decade or so, argues for the importance of retaining the notion of text as a meaningful analytic category (Brunsdon 1989: 120), I take seriously the fact that the shows are produced according to particular industry conventions whose objective it is to make them intelligible in particular ways to the viewers. Recognizing this, my focus on how women make sense of the shows does not simply dissolve the “text” (the program, in this case) into the viewers’ readings of it. This is apparent, for example, when I discuss “the lure” of talk shows for millions of viewers in chapter 5.

I analyze how the women make sense of talk shows by paying close attention to how the women talk about them. I pay attention not only to the substance of what the women say, but also to the systems of meaning and classificatory systems through which they make sense of the shows. For example, what are the terms through which they encounter a particular show as “legitimate,” as “meaningful” or not?

Given my initial interest in how individuals situate themselves in public life generally, and in respect to public discourse more specifically, I also approach what these women share with the question, “What kind of subject would make sense of the show this way?” In paying attention to the terms of the women’s discourse, I seek to understand how each woman situates herself, how she positions herself relative to talk shows. Taking poststructuralist insights seriously,⁷ I recognize a relationship between language and the construction of subjectivity.

While the heart of my study focuses on how women who watch talk shows make sense of them, my analysis would be incomplete without recognizing that this sense-making occurs as part of a wider social field. Poststructuralist insights are instructive in illuminating the relationships between what are distinguished as “macro” and “micro” levels of analysis in traditional social science analysis. The macro and micro levels of analysis are generally distinguished by examination of institutional structures and practices and individual or interpersonal or group structures and practices, respectively. Taking these insights seriously, I examine the institutional structures and practices of the television industry, since these are the basis for the existence of talk shows an...