These Policemen Are Pounding the Wrong Beat

I want her to put on that dog suit and follow my instructions.

--Guest on “Charles Perez” citing his condition for taking back his homely girlfriend.

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If you constantly have affairs with married men and love it, all you have to do is call us.

--Host Carnie Wilson soliciting guests for “Carnie.”

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The taste police are back.

Not a moment too soon, huh? Time to get out the hatchets and smash the stills, right? Time for the odd trio--liberal Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), conservative Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Republican philosopher and former drug czar William J. Bennett--to summon camera crews and toss their values at America like rice at newlyweds.

That’s what they did last week in publicly accusing many TV talk shows of corrupting U.S. morals and harming children, while urging a national campaign against the perpetrators that stops short of censorship or prohibition.

Bennett, co-director of Empower America and an author whose best-selling “Book of Virtues” is being turned into a PBS series, cited shows hosted by Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Montel Williams, Maury Povich, Richard Bey, Geraldo Rivera and Perez as being offensive. Omitted were some new daytime talk hours that imitate the ones deemed so heinous by the Three Wise Men.

It was Bennett and others who successfully pressured Time Warner earlier this year to stop promoting rap music that they said “celebrates the rape, torture and murder of women.” When it comes to talk shows, only some guests and viewers who tune in because they’re masochists get tortured.

Yet what of the millions of Americans who enjoy these shows, some of which are among the most popular syndicated series on television? “There are a lot of things in this society that people spend money on that are not good for them or society,” Lieberman said Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Now, Lieberman may be a swell guy who means well when challenging television to elevate itself, and, as all of us are, he’s entitled to his opinion. You don’t need sonar, though, to detect his paternalism in appearing to say that a couple of senators and a prominent ideologue know better than viewers what they should be watching.

Those of us who regularly write about TV plead guilty to similar arrogance. In contrast, though, these latest do-gooders operate inside the government Beltway, and we’re in for trouble, as Rivera himself noted on “Good Morning America” Friday, “when politicians get involved in policing the popular culture.”

You know how low talk shows have sunk when even Rivera begins sounding like a rational statesman, especially when compared with the really bad boys. “We take real people with real lives and real issues and put them on TV,” Richard Dominick, executive producer of “Jerry Springer,” said last week. “These shows are one of the only forums left for an average person to go and speak their mind. That’s what makes this country so great.”

After hearing that from Dominick, you realize how tragic it is that someone so gifted in comedy should be relegated to the obscurity of producing a talk show.

No wonder that Bennett, Nunn and Lieberman may have pushed a hot button. It’s not easy defending cynical shows that relentlessly depict America as uniformly ugly, shabby and dysfunctional, a place where you’d better watch your back, especially if a close friend or member of your own family is behind you. Nor would anyone want to--except their hosts, producers, TV outlets, advertisers and regular viewers.

What’s to defend? Thursday’s topic on “Sally Jessy Raphael” was “I’m Still Sleeping With My Ex.” Both “Richard Bey” and “Marilyn Kagan” did “I Hate My Sister” hours. The sanctimonious host of “Jerry Springer” almost kept a straight face during “My Sister Stole My Love.” And newcomer “Carnie,” whose lusty host has her own show because she happens to be in her 20s and has the former round shape of super-host Lake, announced, “Our guests have come here today to beg their loved ones to stop sleeping around.” Those guests included a daughter who called her mother a slut. The daughter, 15, was married.

Ever-consistent, Wilson was back Friday all bothered by another 15-year-old girl living with an older man. The girl agreed to take a pregnancy test backstage during a station break, the results (negative) to be announced later in the show by that actress-for-hire, Dr. Joyce Brothers.

Meanwhile, an absentee father admitted on “Rolanda” that he’d cheated on his wife four times, then generously volunteered to rearrange the face of the “punk” who was supporting his kids.

Not that they’re consistently high-minded themselves, but “Donahue” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” are among the few daytime talk shows that haven’t done hours on the pressing issue of hateful siblings. Or mothers who flirt with their daughter’s boyfriends. Or sisters who sleep with their sister’s boyfriends. Or men who fool around on their wives. Or wives who fool around on their husbands. Or daughters outraged that their mini-skirted mothers show off their breasts and dress like hookers. Or teen-agers who are hookers. Or filthy old men who sleep with teen hookers. Or teen hookers who sleep with mothers who flirt with their daughters’ boyfriends and are dying to tell the world about it on national TV.

Most of the people who appear on these shows, as well as those who get really steamed and berate the guests from the studio audience, are either stupid and illiterate or are putting on one hell of an act. Look closely and you may notice the lobotomy scars.

Either that or a New Yorker cartoon may have come close recently in showing a man sitting in front of a decaying, crumbly slum of a trailer park holding a sign that said: “Maps to the homes of talk-show guests.”

You try to envision who is watching them. Watching them not just for a hoot, but watching them and liking what they’re watching. Building their days around it and taking notes in crayon, without ever figuring out that the same topics are constantly being recycled on the same shows. You have the feeling that the viewers are interchangeable with the guests, that they’re having their own negativism affirmed by what they see and hear on the screen. They may be the Americans who lust for paparazzi photos of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger arriving home from the hospital with their 3-day-old baby. The same crowd that doesn’t vote in elections. Or know even when there is an election.

So be it. The point is that unless it’s demonstrated that such shows consistently do harm by promoting destructive behavior (in fact, they ridicule it), they have as much right to the airwaves in their present form as do silk-stocking shows on public TV. As a group, they reach many more viewers than “The Book of Virtues” will on PBS.

How curious, moreover, that some who so avidly put their trust in the marketplace to determine just about everything, somehow distrust and denigrate that marketplace when it comes to TV programs they personally abhor.

If viewers give thumbs-up, these shows, however stinky, earn life. That’s what makes this country so great.