1999

21.3

Daniel Keyes
The Imaginary Community of the Live Studio Audience of Television

According to popular and scholarly publications including Newsweek, Montreal Gazette, and Television Quarterly, during the 1980s and early ‘nineties, television talk hosts such as Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donohue, and, in Canada, Shirley Solomon, claimed that daytime talk shows extend and elaborate a democratic tradition via an electronic medium. While such claims could be easily dismissed as the righteous pleas of self-interested parties protecting their type of programming against charges of "trash" television, these claims were supported by left-leaning cultural critics in the academy who situated this television format as a low-brow and feminist knowledge form that was unsettling the left-right political landscape with a type of identity politics that insisted the private was public and the personal was political.

In various articles and books, Camille Paglia, Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, Wayne Munson, Patricia Priest, Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt, and Paolo Carpignano and collaborators suggested that daytime talk shows offered the possibility of a renewed participatory democracy that erased the hierarchy of expert and lay person while accommodating differing opinions and cultural others. These writers’ positions were sometimes informed by right-wing attempts to censor and boycott this type of programming, but they also revealed an idealism that the marketplace of commercial television could operate as an agora where citizens/spectators can make a difference. Wayne Munson offered an example of this type of unbridled optimism by concluding his book-length study of the entire spectrum of American talk shows: "The old distinction between public and private have, in the talkshow [sic], given way to a new public sphere which we are all ‘inside’ and thus responsible for–one of the new, cyberspatial neighbourhoods we now live in" (156). I tested this hypothesis by going to tapings of various talk shows to examine the performative origins of these "cyberspatial neighbourhoods" and the manner in which they constructed a type of generic TV time and TV land that served not democracy but the dictates of commercial television.

This essay reworks and distils an ethnographic component of my dissertation on the performance of testimonial television on daytime talk shows. As an English graduate student trained in drama, I examined the daytime talk show as a latter-day reworking of Ancient Greek Tragedy which typically focused the audience’s attention on cultural others who violate customs and taboos. In order to investigate the performative constraints and possibilities of the daytime talk show, I began writing a theatre review of the performance that became a type of hybrid ethnography. What follows is derived from attending a number of tapings over a four-year period of the made-in-Canada Shirley daytime talk show. The Shirley show was produced in Toronto, by the Adderly production company from 1989 to 1995 with the backing from the news division of Canada’s only privately owned national television network, CTV. In 1992 the American network ABC flirted with buying the program and distributing it to its affiliate stations, according to the 7 June 1992 issue of the Montreal Gazette (F2). Shirley Solomon, the host of the show, talked of Oprahesque attempts to gain domination south of the border but ultimately the CTV network withdrew backing and the show was taken out of production. At that time, Shirley blamed the demise of the show on low brow audiences that "thirst not for knowledge but depravity." Shirley told Ted Shaw: "Television is a great tool. It can be used for great social good. . . But somewhere, we have lost our way" (B2).
 
 

The following account of attending tapings of the Shirley show demonstrates how daytime talk shows generically produce TV time and TV land. I derive this term from Patricia Mellencamp who describes how television coverage of disasters uses "TV time" to protect the viewer from the emotional stress of the disaster by constantly replaying images of the disaster and giving a sense that the disaster has occurred elsewhere (240-66). These terms describe how daytime talk show producers insure that the time and place of the studio taping appear as a type of "any place" and a live and seemingly immediate "any time" that will suit a generic viewer who may watch this program from any number of locales and at any time. I have italicized the word live here (and throughout the essay) to indicate how the "live-to-tape" format of commercial television acts as a guarantee for home viewers of a sense of immediacy and a seal of authenticity long after the moment of reproduction has passed.

Producers attempt to stage and capture traces of live spectacle while erasing most signs of locality and temporality in order that the programs can be syndicated nationally if not internationally. Local broadcasters, having bought the program from a syndicator, are free to broadcast the "daytime" format whenever they see fit. Additionally, video tape machines allow viewers to watch programs when they wish. Nevertheless, in production these shows attempt to capture a sense of the live that will theoretically compel home viewers to watch the spectacle despite the dislocation in time and place.

With the daytime talk show, producing the qualities of TV land and TV time serves at least two purposes: these qualities provide a limited degree of anonymity and protection for guests who may experience unwanted attention for appearing on the show. Guests are frequently introduced by first names only, thus insuring that they are part of this generic TV land and TV time where they can be "intimate" with millions of strangers they will never see. Secondly, on the level of marketing, these generic qualities permit programs to be sold across national boundaries and to air at any time. As Liam Lacey explains, Shirley can be sold to Zimbabwe, Israel, and the United States, unlike news programming that focuses on specific times and places and has a limited shelf life (C7). Moreover, as Mikita and David Brottman point out, taped live shows of this sort can continue on the air long after production has ceased on the Women’s Television Network in Canada, and they can air in the late evenings despite being billed by their producers as daytime talk shows (95). As a commodity, Shirley is not tied to the specifics of its origin for its reproduction. It is prêt à broadcast.

Daytime talk shows are a peculiar form of live performance that exists primarily for the cameras and the financial interests funding those cameras and their technicians. The phrase live-to-tape does not quite fully describe the unmediated aspects of this textual production. The studio cameras, lights, technicians, and producer shape a video text out of the performance text. The performance text of a daytime talk show is excess: a necessary contrivance to construct the television text. Unlike drama where the written text is necessarily a pre-text to the performance, the talk show’s performance is an ephemeral excess for the production of talk.

The tapings occurred at a studio adjacent to the business district of Toronto. Generally well-groomed and presentable nine-to-five white collar workers could attend the tapings by arriving at the studio after six p.m. Audience members were asked not to wear jeans. At one taping of Shirley, I and another audience member were politely asked to move from the front row floor seats to less conspicuous seats, because we were wearing jeans that would be noticeable to the cameras. All advertisements for participating as an audience member on Shirley noted that one should not wear jeans. My own "difference" as the less than well-groomed audience member, who might distract from the televisual event, needed to be effaced to produce the image of a homogeneous studio audience. Visually the studio audience is groomed for the role of well-groomed middle-class spectators that has assembled to witness freakish guests. The studio audience reinforced the notion that the home viewer is another well-groomed middle-class spectator. At the pre-taping talk for an edition called "Thriving on Rejection" (January 19, 1994), Les Kottler, the executive producer explained that most daytime talk shows were taped in the day and thus their studio audience did not look as "well-dressed" as Shirley’s evening audience. This tactic makes Shirley appear more attractive to potential advertisers seeking a show which will theoretically recruit up-market viewers.

The lobby outside the sound stage/studio doubled as the waiting room for people who often arrived an hour before tapings to queue for the seats of choice. When confirming tickets over the phone, Shirley’s representatives encouraged ticket holders to arrive at least one hour before the studio doors were opened. This recommended hour wait would appear to prey on a "queue mentality" that dictates any event with a waiting line must be worth the wait. In the last year of production, security cameras were discreetly installed on the ceiling of the lobby. Given the often confrontational nature of the taping, this panoptic surveillance was likely employed to get a measure of the audience prior to their entering the studio. No doubt this was not what audience members had in mind when they thought they were going to be on television. A video clip displayed by two television monitors hanging from the ceiling of the lobby instructed the waiting audience on suitable behaviour for TV land: never say "tonight," even though it is the evening, do not chew gum, and please raise your hand when asking questions. In these ways, the studio uses surveillance and soft coercion to insure that the emotive wall paper of the studio audience would provide the proper backdrop in Shirley’s TV land. There was one more message on the video monitors: once the taping began, we were not to leave our seats or the studio. This was a message that the producer and production assistant reiterated in their pre-taping banter. Home viewers could go to their refrigerators for a break during commercial segments, but we were to remain seated during the commercial black out. We were to be the picture of the attentive audience on the screen.

Before entering the studio, overcoats, bags, or knapsacks are checked, lest this "street wear" appears on camera. Beyond concerns for security, this probably occurs so that home viewers can watch an audience that appears as if it is at home, just like them. For American viewers in southern climes, the sight of an audience in snow boots, toques, and parkas might give the show a quaint but a dreary undertone. An audience dressed in winter wear may be appropriate for a taping in February, but if the program is repeat-broadcaste in August, it will look odd and non-live. The geography and time of the taping were TV land and TV time where people were dressed as a home audience should be. When turned on, the bright lights increase the studio temperature by ten degrees and suggest that this TV time is specifically an eternally bright and cheerful daytime. Additionally, this rise in temperature may help to provoke confrontation in guests and audience. Naturally the home viewer does not experience the heat of these lamps. John Sutherland, a carpenter who built the set for Shirley, told me that the show’s workers jokingly called the set the "bear pit" in euphemistic reference to the dubious theatrical tradition of bear- bating spectacles. Despite sitting in chairs ringing the "bear pit," the producer wishes the studio audience to appear to "be home" in TV land.

The "theatrical" experience of performing the role of studio audience is a strange affair. In most conventional theatres, an audience member can expect to be entertained without having his or her reactions coached by a team of producers. Conventional theatres are seldom free. Here, in the television studio, where the tickets are free, the producer lets us know that the price of admission is to be paid by our animated responses. We are told that the success of the show depends on our loud reactions. We are led through an exercise of booing, cheering, and applause. The success of the show depends on us appearing as an image of a cohesive community rather than a collection of disinterested strangers with divisive opinions caught in the glare of TV land’s cameras and lights

On television, the studio audience looks somehow bigger than it was in the studio. This effect is achieved with the use of multiple camera angles which give a variety of shots of the same audience. We, the studio audience, are prompted by an applause sign and a technician to supply the commodity of applause for the opening credits, and the opening and closing of each taped segment. This is a strange type of performance for one is cajoled to applaud before the performance. The audience is "warmed up" in the studio by Les Kottler, who besides being the producer of the show is also Shirley’s husband. I mention that Les and Shirley are husband and wife because this fact is announced at every pre-taping talk I attended. They project an image of themselves as average people whose jobs are to portray the bizarre without being bizarre themselves. I will use Les rather than Kottler to refer to the producer to highlight the type of televisual familiarity that Shirley and Les used to gain rapport with the studio audience. Even on nights when his casual survey via a show of hands demonstrated there were few Shirley fans in the audience, Les’s warm up talk assumed a sense of televisual familiarity.

Les also used this "warm up" time to elicit possible topics for upcoming shows from the studio audience. At a number of tapings, Shirley and her husband joked about the freakish nature of their business during this call for topics by alluding to sarcastic titles for upcoming shows prior to guests being on stage. The implication of this humor is that Shirley and Les side with the audience in spectating the "freaks." Perhaps mentioning their marital status created an atmosphere of intimacy and what Michael Warner calls "heteronormativity"(xxi). The studio audience feels that they are not just seeing Shirley, but seeing Shirley: a loving wife who no doubt shares many of the suburban middle-class values of the nine-to-five office workers attending the taping and her fans in the audience who fit the essential target demographics of the program. At a number of tapings, I sensed that they misjudged their audience, and that their humor offended some of the "freaks" in the studio audience. Here in the TV land of the studio, the spectacle of alterity and transgression on the stage is contained by an audience that is groomed to represent homogeneous values.

Our responses during the warm-up period, as aforementioned, were taped in case Shirley needed more "cut away" footage of audience members. Les explained that the sound of our clapping at the beginning of each segment served the purpose of bringing the home viewer back from the refrigerator to the television in the living room. His characterisation of the viewer’s journey between refrigerator and television places the viewer in a domestic setting dominated by leisure and consumption. In this odd social experiment, we were conditioned to ring the Pavlovian bell for the home viewer.

In the last year of production, Les used a sense of nationalism to elicit greater studio audience response by calling for a "New York Style Applause," adding that Canadians have a reputation for being too polite and quiet. This leads me to suspect the origins of commercial television’s TV lands exist somewhere in Manhattan. Live applause was a valuable commodity that the producer purchased for little expense from the studio audience.

Seating in this studio is ordered. Once the doors were open to the studio, the audience were seated in groups of ten by production assistants. Friends of the guests or Shirley had seats reserved on the lower tier closest to the stage. The slightly larger back tier was filled by people who usually did not have a vested interest in the topic. Shirley usually started by asking questions from the lower tier first. This occurred at the edition "Sex Workers and Their Partners" (taped November 28, 1994). Close friends and customers of the people on stage asked generally flattering questions of the sex workers. In fact, one audience member identified himself as a patron of one of the guests and another as a friend of one of the dancers. Shirley, at one point, asked one of these questioners if he was a male stripper. The two guests opposed to sex work did not appear to have any supporters in this lower tier. After the next commercial break, Shirley moved up to the second tier and elicited responses from people who were less than impressed by the testimony of the guests.

In some instances, the production assistants rearranged the audience to produce a specific type of grouping. In the second segment of "Sex Workers and Their Partners," a male stripper named Burning Desire partially disrobed to dance music and flashing lights. Prior to his dance, production assistants asked people to move to make it easier to record the reactions of young, white, photogenic women. A well-dressed Asian gentleman, who rarely missed tapings, resisted moving from his seat where the cameras were focused, but finally was gently coaxed into seating elsewhere. Once again the audience was manipulated according to the dictates of the advertisers’ demographics for race, gender, and heteronormativity.

Most of the time it was not necessary to move audience members, because with tight close ups of audience members, the studio cameramen provided the images necessary to supplement the guest’s narrative. For example, on the edition "Black Sheep of the Family" (taped March 18, 1993), confessions by the four guests of disruptive relations between mother and daughter were intercut with twenty-six separate close ups of female audience members, even though the audience consists of a mix of men and women. When guests’ confessions referred to their younger, wilder behaviour, the audience close ups were invariably of younger women in the audience. When their confessions referred to maternal struggles, the camera would seek out older-looking women. In this way, Shirley used the audience to construct a series of silent split-second commentaries on these intimate and public confessions. This fusion of mimesis and diegesis demonstrated how Shirley ‘s TV land constructed responses that attempt to direct and anticipate the home viewer’s responses

When the taping began, we entered into the one-hour time structure of the program. The taping was divided into seven segments. Commercial breaks, resulting from this division, were used by the production team to regroup and prepare Shirley for the next segment. During these commercial breaks, various production assistants milled about Shirley, giving her water and prompting her on questions she should ask. They also elicited and selected questions and comments from the studio audience so that when Shirley was on camera she appeared to control the flow and direction of the show. While on television Shirley may appear as one person (constructed by various camera angles), during the performance "she" was produced by these various technicians and production assistants, most of whom are male. While listening to guests or talking, Shirley communicated with the producer, who raised large flash cards telling her how much time she had and prompting her on questions she should ask. During breaks in taping, production assistants moved audience members with telegenic questions to seating closer to Shirley so that on camera she appears to float effortlessly from one questioner to the next. Her script was improvised by the team around her. Shirley inverted the scenario from the movie The Wizard of Oz where the wizard, a diminutive mortal, runs a powerful machine to give the impression of omnipotence. Here in Shirley’s studio, Shirley as televisual cyborg is produced to render the image of an empathic and almost telepathic talk show host who feels, shares, and broadcasts her guests’ confessions.

When it is finally broadcast, the show is fragmented by a wide variety of commercials aimed at the viewer. Foreshadowings of upcoming disclosures are designed to keep the viewers tuned in during the commercial segments. The commercials for Shirley appear to be aimed at the traditional daytime home viewer. No matter what Shirley or the guests are speaking about, the commercials extol the pleasure and necessity of watching upcoming television shows, feminine hygiene products, and, of course, soap. The content of the daytime talk show is oblivious to this counter-narrative. This becomes readily apparent during the edition of Shirley dealing with reconciling children of Nazi officials and Holocaust survivors where the whole pace of the show was slowed down to reflect the gravity of the subject. The sombre violin music accompanied by prolonged cutaway shots of Shirley consoling grieving audience members suddenly segues to boisterous K-mart commercials. As a viewer, I am not sure what to make of this quick transition from "serious" healing ritual to upbeat consumerism. The testimonials by children of death camp survivors and guards do not make me want to shop. With these commercials the media economy asserts one rapid, fragmented message: Consume.

In the studio performance, however, commercial breaks heighten the dramatic tension. They appear to become more frequent during the end of the taping. Moreover, there is a constant countdown to the resumption of taping that sends the production assistants scurrying away from the multiple perspectives of the panoptic cameras. In this way, members of the studio audience internalize anxiety. They are warned that there is only a limited time remaining for questions and that they might not get their question in if they do not become more pro-active. It seems like the taping is suddenly over and the issues have not been resolved.

Nevertheless, members of the audience, for the most part, leave to pick up their coats at the coat check still discussing and evaluating the performance. Questions concerning the sincerity and righteousness of the guests recur in the lobby. The sanctioned space for talk may have been discreetly marked out and closed off but, for some, talk continues. Our talk returns to small talk and chatter as we no longer inhabit the realm of TV land and TV time where there is the chance that our voices can be heard by millions of viewers. Nevertheless as the fine print of a "free" ticket to another daytime talk show contractually boasts, the producer may "utilize the holder’s name, image, voice and/or their likeness worldwide in all media in perpetuity."

As a studio audience member, I have performed my role by providing reactions for a performance text that exists as excess for the commodity of the television show. To simulate face-to-face communication for this program, I have provided my face as part of the live emotional wallpaper for an unseen home viewer. Fortunately my performance does not end with these nights of entertainment but blends into this consideration of the format.

This account of attending Shirley attempts to make part of the wallpaper speak by articulating my voice which is objectified by Shirley’s panoptic studio. Various righteous daytime talk show hosts and a group of academic critics maintain these programs initiate a popular poly-vocal electronic democratic forum where citizens make a difference. However, the studio audience as managed by Shirley’s panoptic studio rarely has a chance to achieve this noble goal. The prefix for panoptic, pan, is derived from Greek where it means "all." Thus, panoptic literally means "all seeing." The panoptic machine of Shirley organises and manages the live studio audience’s performance to fit the live video transmission which can be broadcast in generic TV lands and TV times. Shirley reduces television’s potential for "all seeing" to a narrower more mono-optic perspective.

In production, commercial television works towards this monologic form. Perhaps daytime talk shows are a radical form of television in so much as they tend to preserve faint traces of disruptive poly-vocal talk. The left-leaning academics cited at the outset of this paper have astutely recognised this potential: the performance is a representation of a live poly-vocal confrontational-adversarial democracy where anything could happen, but will not because the producers have a stake in controlling and packaging this commodity of talk for advertisers and their chosen demographic. Thus it is clear that Wayne Munson’s talk show utopia of cyberspatial neighbourhoods tends to gloss over power imbalances, hierarchies, and constraints that police and discipline these neighbourhoods. Shirley’s producers coach the audience and guest performers and control the time and space to create a product that can be sold in as many locales as possible. Their "neighbourhood watch" need not necessarily result in the willing submission of all its residents. There may be viewers outside or inside the producers’ chosen demographic who see the way the text is constructed and view against the grain of TV land’s monologic discourse to find other buried voices seeking recognition. If so, these viewers are functioning very much counter to the intentions and actions of the producers.

Daniel Keyes
228 E. 22nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC
 
 

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