"The Money Shot" by Laura Grindstaff

The producers of daytime TV talk shows must woo wife beaters, drug addicts and other scum as guests. Their reward? Being treated like bottom-feeding slime by a public that laps it up.

By Damien Cave

Sep 25, 2002 | When considering the worst job on earth -- the least rewarding, most exhausting, evil, cruel and unusual daily punishment ever, the kind of job that would make me want to hammer a meat thermometer into my own temple -- I've always thought of mining. To get paid nearly nothing to spend all day in a dark, hot, malodorous hole, only to die young of silicosis or worse -- no profession, I figured, could possibly prompt as many screams of occupationally inspired terror.

But lo and behold, Laura Grindstaff, a sociology professor at the University of California at Davis, has managed to throw my conclusion into doubt. Her new book, "The Money Shot: Trash, Class and the Making of TV Talk Shows," convincingly makes the case that TV talk-show producers have the worst gig going.

These people spend their days and nights wooing and catering to the most difficult members of society, everyone from drug addicts to wife beaters to the emotionally disturbed. They work crazy long hours, make less money than their prime-time peers, and are generally treated by the public and the guests themselves as the bottom-feeding, slime-oozing slugs of American culture. It's no wonder, Grindstaff argues, that "the emotional labor required of producers in securing emotional displays from guests leaves them wondering two things: how much longer can I do this? And, should I be doing this at all?"

Of course, inspiring sympathy for producers is hardly Grindstaff's primary purpose. She spent more than a year working at two unnamed TV talk shows, one on the trashier end of the spectrum, the other more respected, and her book is a broad ethnographic account of the experience. It's also, she writes, a treatise on the way that daytime talk shows "both challenge and reinscribe long-standing hierarchies between high and low culture, expert and ordinary knowledge, and the ways in which these hierarchies are related to social especially class inequality."

This is all true, but academic goals aside, the book mainly reads like an intelligent insider's account of the sensational sausage factory called daytime TV. It's a credit to Grindstaff's skills as an interviewer, observer and writer that the first impression you come away with is not a dry and professorial one, but rather a personal one. She fosters a sense of empathy with the shame of those who toil in the trenches of trash. Indeed, what sets Grindstaff apart from most media critics who have addressed the genre is her ability to walk the line between stinging critique and enthusiastic rave. She never revels in the stink of daytime TV, nor does she offer a paternalistic indictment (à la William Bennett) or a liberal acquittal (see Barbara Ehrenreich). Instead, she set out to understand rather than to judge, to grasp how producers, guests and experts combine to form thunderous emotional climaxes -- the "money shots" of the title -- every day. Despite some occasionally arid writing, Grindstaff largely succeeds.

She begins by humanizing producers, who do things like insist on dressing guests in provocative clothes because, Grindstaff argues, they are both creators of the genre's sensationalistic focus and slaves to the competitive need for high ratings. From there, Grindstaff moves on to the guests. Their ideas, motivations and flaws are all profiled in anecdotal detail. Why would someone willingly appear on a show whose premise is "Transsexuals Attack!" or "Mom, why did you abuse me?" What possible satisfaction can they get from announcing to the nation that they, say, slept with their sister's husband or can't live without a man? Do they have regrets? Those are just a few of the questions that Grindstaff poses, and the answers turn out to be surprising.

For example, the assumption that guests appear on talk shows simply because they selfishly enjoy the attention, or because they are manipulated into appearing, seems to be without merit. It's not uncommon to find guests who are extremely goal oriented: people like Anitra, a guest on a "Dysfunctional Families" segment of "The Jenny Jones Show," who says she went on the show "because my girlfriend said, 'If you get national attention to your case, maybe your sister will leave you alone'"; or Nancy, a guest on a show about "Abusive Relationships," who figured, "If I was going to be involved in this issue of, uh, battered women's syndrome, then why not? [Daytime talk] would be a good arena for me to get into."

Most people who go on talk shows are also far more media savvy than generally assumed. They often know how they're expected to perform and have no problem complying. They tend to leave feeling no more exploited by producers than anyone else who has had their thoughts turned into a sound bite in a newspaper or TV news story -- and many are hardly ignorant about how their appearance will be perceived by the culture at large. In the words of one woman, a drug addict who agreed to be confronted by her children for a show called "My Mom Needs Help": "I knew that I might be humiliated, but I was pretty excited about going."

Next Page: Cornering that bigamist husband on national TV

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