| t u b e |
|
Too Hot For Talk
by Austin Graham
Our much-anticipated Jerry Springer: Too Hot for TV viewing celebration didn't start with the bang you might expect. Instead, a sort of pre-partying veil of mystery was thrown over the whole event. At first there were only hopeful rumors floating around. "Did he actually order it?" "He paid twenty-five dollars for that thing?" "Was he drunk, stoned, or what?" came up over dinner on a number of occasions. Eventually it was revealed by a roommate that yes, Craig had ordered the best of the three-ring circus that is Mr. Springer's afternoon talk show, no, he had not been intoxicated, and he didn't want anyone to know his dirty secret until the goods actually came in the mail.
By the time Monday night and the big event rolled around, the hearsay had gotten my blood running for Springer the way that late night commercials couldn't. I don't know what else to liken my state of mind to, other than the way I felt when I heard that professional wrestling was actually coming to U.Va. (March 27 at U-Hall ... see you there!) I was anticipating jibes from the audience, frothing-at-the-mouth soliloquies from the feuders on stage, and a liberal dose of flying furniture ... just like Monday Nitro in all its tacky glory.
To compare the mythic worlds of wrestling and Jerry Springer, however, implies that both can be taken with a grain of salt. Too Hot For TV is not the trashy comedy of errors I expected, and the raunchy amusement I'd hoped for was nowhere to be found.
If you sit through "Paternity Tests Revealed" all the way to "I'm a Teenage Call Girl," you're going to find that your idealized view (if you have one) of talk shows as being no more serious than a semi-amusing cat fight misses the mark. Yes, there are a few moments of comic violence (the dude who got a bouquet smacked across his face for his rudeness and the guy with the NASCAR hairdo looking for a fight after falling backwards out of his chair were my personal favorites), but there's plenty in this video to drive home the fact that a lot of tough issues don't end as the credits roll across the audience cheering for more mayhem.
A family falls apart, probably irreparably, every few scenes or so, but I think the most sobering tableau was "It's Your Bachelor Party or Me!" The issue is obvious, but after the bride-to-be asks her fiancé to find some other way to spend his last night as a single man, one of the groom's buddies pushes everything a step further: he stands up and decrees "Hey, we'll have the bachelor party right now! Lights! Music!" And in what is supposed to resemble a moment of spontaneity, a pseudo-strobe light kicks in, a generic booty-mix starts pumping, and a couple of strippers who'd been waiting in the wings come in and do their thing. After tugging and pleading fails to stop her future husband from licking a little cleavage, the young lady, true to her word, gives back the engagement ring and leaves the sordid party with a consoling friend.
When we watch television we're looking for spectacles. As indifferent as I was to Wag the Dog, I'll agree with its assertion that these days even the news needs to be packaged in such a way as to simultaneously entertain (or is that distract?) and inform. While Jerry Springer certainly isn't news, it isn't the spectacle of consequence-free brawling and profanity I think we all expect from this medium, either. That's the entertainment we're looking for in Too Hot For TV, something fake and easy to dismiss, but it's not there. Instead, the anger, jealousy, and desperation turns out seeming as genuine as reading someone else's diary, though of the thrill of actually knowing whose privacy you're violating is absent.
Romanticism versus reality in the talk show world is at the core of this video. For every pie in the face from an anonymous overweight aunt during "Holiday Hell With My Feuding Family," there's a horrifyingly ugly racial slur from the KKK in "I'm Proud To Be A Racist" from which no one can be detached enough to laugh off. There are a few memorable insults (including "you're an Everclear whore!"), but to balance those you've got a woman in tears looking for a telephone so she can call the police to get her own sister thrown in jail. Too Hot for TV is at best half-amusing in a distant way, and at worst mostly sickening deep in your gut.
Of course, it all depends on how you digest what you see; everyone at our party had a different reaction. I was dismayed at the depths to which individuals can sink, airing dirty laundry for a national audience. Others lamented the society that forces people into such humiliating roles and then preys on them for amusement. We were treated to numerous re-plays of one of the more effective right hooks on "I'm Sleeping With Your Man!" by the owner of the remote control. But even if you're looking for some quality violence and nudity to pass the evening, you're headed for a lackluster show. The majority of this tape features guests wrangling with the security guards who bellow "Calm down!" over and over, and please believe me when I say that you don't want to see the woman with the pillow-sized breasts do the splits.
I refuse to turn this review into a criticism of the bread-and-circus mentality of talk show audiences, though. To do so is, in my estimation, to try to take a lofty, holier-than-thou path that I'm not up to climbing, considering that I've watched talk shows and a few soaps with an admittedly sick fascination. In reviewing, I set out to answer a pretty basic question: should you pay money to see this thing or not?
The answer's going to have to be no, but if you have the opportunity to get in on a viewing for free, go for it. I would recommend, though, that you alter your expectations before getting Springer rolling because if you're a believer in the entertaining talk show myth, you'll probably be disappointed. Only those with their fingers crossed for forty minutes of hideous haircuts will get what they really want.
|
back to Decweb main |
