For Skewed Look at Adult Life, Turn On TV Talk Shows

Thinking, thinking, thinking. All this thinking, and to what end? That’s what I was thinking last week as I sat at my desk arranging my paper clips in that clever way I do. I’ve been thinking way too much, I thought, giving too much of myself to the public, to the company. Why let my selfless dedication lead me to the brink of nervous exhaustion?

Concluding that I’ve been severely put upon and that righteousness was mine, I waited until my boss wasn’t looking and sneaked out the side door.

I sped home, smug in the belief that leaving work at 2:30 in the afternoon represented a great triumph of the individual over the corporation. So this is how the real world looks on a midweek afternoon , I thought, as I shed my shirt and tie and headed outside to catch some rays.

After about an hour, I decided to switch venues, so I came back inside and flipped on the TV. It was nostalgic because this was the time of day when as a youngster I would have been getting home from school and plopping down for some afternoon TV watching.

The programs that came to mind were the game shows (I loved the “Match Game” with Gene Rayburn) or “The Mike Douglas Show,” a talk/variety show that introduced me to a funny young comic named George Carlin.

Amusing, entertaining TV fare. No wonder I turned out to be such a swell guy.

With mind and body in recline on the couch, I checked the newspaper listing for “Donahue” on Channel 4: “Eighth-grade teacher imprisoned for statutory rape.” I passed on that. I tuned in to the last half of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on Channel 7: “Suspicious Wives” was the subject matter. I watched briefly, and one of the women said she tried to shoot her husband after she found him in bed with another woman, but the gun misfired. As she told the story, her husband was sitting next to her. They were holding hands.

After “Oprah” came “Geraldo” at 4 o’clock. His topic: “Divorced Men Who Want Their Wives Back.” I watched most of that, switching occasionally to “The Montel Williams Show” on Channel 13. The TV magazine listing for “Montel Williams” was “Women Who Battle Over Men,” but it turned out instead to be a show on 12-year-old Percy who had committed 56 crimes. The boy, wearing dark glasses and with a cap pulled down over his forehead, sat onstage with other panelists but, during the long stretches I watched, didn’t say a word throughout the hourlong program.

I zeroed in on Geraldo’s show. David and Melissa had been married but were now divorced. David said his wife still loves him and that he wants her back. Melissa, who said she didn’t love David, sat onstage between David and her new boyfriend Jim. Melissa said David had threatened at least once to kill their kids. David said Melissa had no right to talk because she had threatened to kill herself.

Melissa said she wished Geraldo would phone her mother to get the real truth, so Geraldo did. Her mother’s voice was piped in, and she said David was possessive. She also said Melissa has always craved the attention of men. David pointed out that Melissa’s mother had married one of her daughter’s old boyfriends.

Jim said David was obsessive. However, Jim also told Geraldo he was getting leery of the whole David-Melissa situation and was thinking of dumping Melissa. Then, from backstage, another woman came out and said she and Jim had been together for years and that Jim, while supposedly dating Melissa, had recently proposed to her. She described herself as an “emotional mess” because of the whole situation.

Meanwhile, back on “The Montel Williams Show,” 12-year-old Percy was still playing the Sphinx. I switched over for good when an audience member said Percy was a victim, and others applauded the remark.

Those shows carried me right on through to 5 o’clock, where Jane Whitney’s talk show featured two average-size guys and two women each weighing more than 300 pounds. The men talked about their attraction to fat women. The tagline under Gerri, one of the women, said: “Says Men Drool Over Her Like a Goddess.”

That concluded my TV watching for the afternoon. I didn’t fret over my own blown hour or so. Instead I wondered about a generation of children today who come home from school, much as I and my friends had done 25 or 30 years ago, and stumble across these shows on TV.

If this is how they shape their view of adult life, no wonder we have so many troubled teens.

Watching the procession from Donahue to Oprah to Geraldo, I couldn’t help but think of a line I’d read just the night before from Oscar Wilde:

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”