Here is some more musings on the disastrous (for a number of reasons) fad of Talk Shows from a previous generation. None of my musings are in any order and maybe one day I’ll edit this into a more cohesive package….until then…you are on your own!
 

The Talk Show Circus (or, more accurately, The Talk Show Freak Show of the late 1980’s/early 1990’s) followed the same formula that the circus followed with one deviation. A circus displays a stunt, an oddity, or something out of the ordinary and this attracts an audience as does a talk show. The circus, however, only comes once a year and with good reason: it wouldn’t be able to sustain an audience on a daily basis.

Consider the following scenario if a circus had to sell tickets in the same city five days a week for a year: If the circus featured an acrobat who performed a double summersault the audience come back again to see the double summersault once or twice, but three times? Why? They had already seen it. So, you need to get them in with a triple summersault. Then a triple summersault with no net and in six months it will be a quintuple summersault over a live tank of starving piranhas. Then, eventually it will not be able to go any further. This was the problem with the sleazy talk shows. There was only so much you could do to be shocking before everything spun off into absurdity. Without any intellectual basis so as to use a stimulation of the desire to learn as a means of drawing in an audience, talk shows started to burn themselves out as they devolved into a glorified stunt show. When you add to this the fact that there were FAR too many programs on the air, all of which were essentially the same and each lacking a compelling format that distinguished them from one another….ratings began to decline. When Phil Donohue called it quits (well, his show was cancelled due to low ratings) a chill went up the spine of the networks as they realized that the Talk Show fad was doomed to a short shelf life.

Another problem that existed with these programs is the fact that they create a sense of alarmism where alarmism doesn’t exist. In other words, when they debut a program about spouses cheating with their in laws the programs create a notion that this is a problem when in fact the problem really doesn’t exist. If it did exist to the degree that these old talk shows claimed then we would see them. The reason we don’t see them is that the programs data mined millions of people to find a rare exception and, in some cases, the guests lied about their situation to get on TV. Then, there are those “guests” who were actors in a complete scripted scenario that was pawned off as real people. Regardless of the situation, when you attempt to create a “sky is falling scenario” people will fall for it out of a sense of self preservation…until enough weeks go by that it is obvious the sky isn’t falling. Then, they stop taking the programming serious and a lack of serious interest is a precursor to a boredom which is a precursor to flipping channels which is a precursor to the death of the talk show.