When a Talk Show’s ‘Surprise’ Backfires

Enough! Enough! Enough!

Some daytime talk-show hosts thrive on combustibility, the most striking example being Geraldo Rivera’s famous episode that erupted into a chair-tossing, punch-throwing mini-race war and earned him a broken nose that he exhibited like a trophy.

Other predatory daytime talk shows, such as “Ricki Lake,” “Montel Williams” and “Jenny Jones,” are notorious for springing embarrassing “surprises” on guests in hopes of creating those spontaneous explosions of raw emotions that are known as “great television.” Shock the guest, wound the guest, humiliate the guest, reveal intimate details of his or her life in front of a studio audience with the cameras rolling, then sit back gleefully and watch what happens.

It was inevitable that this dangerous, foolhardy game of Russian roulette would some day end in tragedy. And so it did, according to Rochester, Mich., authorities, when the loaded chamber came up for Scott Amedure.

Jonathan T. Schmitz is being held without bail in Rochester, charged with first-degree murder in the shotgun slaying of Amedure last Thursday. Although Schmitz has since pleaded not guilty, police say he initially admitted to the murder. They say Schmitz went to Amedure’s home and shot him twice in the chest three days after Amedure had told Schmitz during a taping of a “Secret Admirers” segment of “Jenny Jones” that he had a crush on him.

Police say Schmitz was angry because he anticipated his secret admirer being female, only to learn after being brought out on stage in front of the studio audience that it was Amedure, someone he had met several weeks earlier.

Predictably, Jones and her producers are accepting no responsibility for the bloody outcome of “Secret Admirers.”

“There was no wrongdoing on anyone’s part connected with the show,” Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions, the Time Warner company that produces “Jenny Jones,” said in a statement released Friday. “Before each guest agreed to be on the show, he or she was fully briefed and each were told that their secret admirer could be a man or a woman. No one was lied to, no one was misled. We observed nothing confrontational or any signs of embarrassment between any of the guests before, during or after the taping.”

Schmitz “was stunned” to hear that Amedure had a crush on him, one police officer told the Associated Press. “He had agreed to do the show, so he didn’t know what to do or what his rights were. So he sat there and went along with it.”

A San Jose woman last year told of a similar feeling of helplessness during a taping of “Montel Williams” after being informed on camera by her sister that she had been regularly sleeping with the woman’s live-in boyfriend. The woman’s numbing shock was visible on camera. Her subsequent suit against the Williams show, claiming public humiliation, was settled out of court.

If police are correct, Schmitz chose the lethal over the litigious route. They say the show had “eaten at him,” the final provocation coming when he found a note at his home that he attributed to Amedure. At that point, he went out and bought a shotgun, they say.

“Our concern now is for the family and friends of the deceased and (for) maintaining the sanctity of the police investigation and the case,” Paratore said.

His concern comes a couple of shotgun blasts too late. And his rejection of blame is cynical and without merit. For example, do Jones or the show’s producers ever investigate the temperaments or personality traits of those they seek to embarrass? Did they know anything about Schmitz? Did they know about submerged feelings he may have about homosexuality? Did they know what pushed his buttons, how he would react that day, the next day, in two days, three days or a month, after being told publicly that he was the object of a gay man’s affections? Did they know if he was emotionally stable? Did they know if he had a violent streak? Did they know about his mental health, whether he might be a time bomb ready to explode? Did they know anything at all about this man other than he was going to be one of their patsies?

Obviously not. Nor did they care. Someone else pulled the trigger, but they were the ones who blindly spun the chamber and hoped for the best. For that reason, they are all accessories.

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HE SHOULD KNOW. After leaving his job as sportscaster and sports anchor for Bakersfield station KERO-TV in 1987, Brian E. Nordquist filed a claim against KERO seeking recovery of nearly $103,000 in overtime that he contended the station owed him.

KERO had classified Nordquist as a “creative talent” whose job required skill, originality, discretion and independent judgment, thereby exempting him from state law requiring that non-exempt broadcast employees be paid time and a half to double time for work in excess of eight hours a day and 40 hours a week.

Nordquist, a sportscaster at the station for four years, argued that he did qualify for non-exempt status because he: (1) either rewrote or copied word-for-word news items from newspapers, wire services and other sources, (2) used routine shooting and editing techniques, (3) received guidance from a studio director through an earpiece, (4) rarely deviated from the script he read from a TelePrompTer and (5) “ad-libbed” only occasionally, and then only after planning his spontaneous remarks with the news anchors.

Would the courts buy his low opinion of his job?

Affirming a lower court opinion, the 5th District Court of Appeal last month ruled that Nordquist was entitled to recover the overtime pay he was seeking, agreeing with him that the duties of a sportscaster were mostly “mundane and routine.”

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SLOPPY TALK. Almost enviously, it seemed, the syndicated “Hard Copy” last week described as “the latest outrage” a coming “Candyman” movie that it said was “causing problems at the Simpson trial.” Then, after a clip showing a black man menacing a white woman, reporter Jody Baskerville weighed in, calling the movie “a case of art imitating life.”

Only if you agree with the prosecution (which reporter Baskerville shouldn’t be doing even on a slop mill like “Hard Copy”) that the slayer of Nicole Brown Simpson, and presumably also Ronald Lyle Goldman, was a black man and, by extension, O.J. Simpson.

A case of artifice imitating life?