To be a talk-show host, to state the painfully obvious, must be a very weird experience. It is literally your job to get along with everyone you encounter, to always have to know what to say and how best to say it. Since the majority of your guests are simply there to plug their latest projects, which you may or may not check out and may or may not enjoy, you also are put into the position of having to pretend the affirmative on both of those things. I just loved your [movie/teevee show/album/book], really! Eventually, as David Letterman showed us, such a thing wears a normal person down.
The personality traits seem by definition to be heightened in the daytime arena, where the fluff is even fluffier, and the goal seems to be to provide solace and affirmation to whatever the audience is stuck spending their afternoon tuning into such a thing. Daytime hosts are the hype people for video wallpaper, essentially. And they do it with the persona of being everyone's friend.
Oprah is the queen of this sort of thing, of course, and she's very good at it. She has cemented herself in the American psyche as a goodwill ambassador, someone whose work ethic and positive attitude has transformed lives.
But she has also inflicted Doctors Oz and Phil on an unsuspecting nation, so there's that. She is tight with Tyler Perry, who poses as a champion for black artistes, while simultaneously building an empire on the backs of non-union contract workers.
So when we all saw Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to ol' Fredo Arbusto at the Cowboys-Packers game last Sunday, one instantly assumed the requisite round of side-taking and tribal affirmation. I think it does say something about Ellen, but it also says -- as these things always do -- so much more about us, and our supposed deep concerns, and how impotent online twitrage is supposed to equal some sort of constructive action or activity.
The personality traits seem by definition to be heightened in the daytime arena, where the fluff is even fluffier, and the goal seems to be to provide solace and affirmation to whatever the audience is stuck spending their afternoon tuning into such a thing. Daytime hosts are the hype people for video wallpaper, essentially. And they do it with the persona of being everyone's friend.
Oprah is the queen of this sort of thing, of course, and she's very good at it. She has cemented herself in the American psyche as a goodwill ambassador, someone whose work ethic and positive attitude has transformed lives.
But she has also inflicted Doctors Oz and Phil on an unsuspecting nation, so there's that. She is tight with Tyler Perry, who poses as a champion for black artistes, while simultaneously building an empire on the backs of non-union contract workers.
So when we all saw Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to ol' Fredo Arbusto at the Cowboys-Packers game last Sunday, one instantly assumed the requisite round of side-taking and tribal affirmation. I think it does say something about Ellen, but it also says -- as these things always do -- so much more about us, and our supposed deep concerns, and how impotent online twitrage is supposed to equal some sort of constructive action or activity.
