Dr. Phil’s Advice: Live the Life You Want While Watching My Show

Few therapists, even in Los Angeles, face such a difficult life choice: What music video would best goose a crowd of thousands, moments before being introduced?

But life is about such hard choices and Dr. Phil and his “Get Real” 15-city national tour didn’t blink Thursday evening at the Universal Amphitheatre. The nod went to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”

Good call, Dr. Phil! It’s that kind of decision-making that rocketed the once-obscure expert witness and clinical psychologist from Texas into a bona fide television star now living in Los Angeles.

Twain’s rock ‘n’ country ode to female empowerment blasting away from two wide screens had his largely female fans on their feet clapping, dancing and yee-hawing in no time. As anyone who has tuned into “Oprah” on Tuesdays knows, Dr. Phillip C. McGraw is no dummy, and it’s not just because, as he says, he’s got “more degrees than a thermometer.”

He knows his chief demographic--women between 30 and 50. And more than the music was geared toward them during his 90-minute show, which was equal parts therapy session, tent revival and show business. Outside the venue, in a masterful stroke of cross-marketing, arriving fans were offered one of Dr. Phil’s bestselling books or tapes if they joined Sam’s Club. Big line for that one.

Inside the venue, it was really a kinder, gentler Dr. Phil. Largely gone was the browbeating therapist on “Oprah.” Instead he talked about broad common themes of living an authentic life. Live the life you want, he urged his audience, not the life someone else expects of you.

The venue also gave Dr. Phil a chance to show off his storytelling skills, which are considerable. Between his country drawl and his folksy charm, he held the audience in rapt attention with tales from his own marriage to his misadventures as a drag-racing youth. You got the idea after hearing a story about a policeman punching the teeth out of a boyhood friend who was caught drag racing in town, however, that maybe not all the details transpired exactly as Dr. Phil said. But the embellishment is part of his charm.

Over the course of the evening, one got the idea that the “Get Real” tour’s real intent wasn’t so much to help the masses as to promote his upcoming television show, which debuts on NBC Sept. 16. (It’s at 4 p.m., so it won’t conflict with Oprah.)

Before his appearance, a show producer appealed to the audience to watch the show (as did KNBC news anchor Colleen Williams and KOST radio talk show hosts Mark and Kim, as well as Dr. Phil’s 22-year-old son). It wasn’t just viewers they needed either, it was questions for Dr. Phil to answer on the air. And they were short on guests, too, for upcoming shows on mooching, gossip and cheating.

If this country boy, as Dr. Phil called himself, isn’t careful, he’s going to be a city slicker before he knows it.