As a homemaker in the ’80s and ’90s, my mom watched a lot of daytime television while tethered to the house. Most mornings started with The Today Show, which wasn’t yet the bloated monstrosity it became, and when that was over it was time for Donahue.*
“Caller, are you there?” Phil Donahue asked viewers who phoned in with questions about the topic du jour, and back in the Reagan years there was none of the hooting and hollering and “Oh, no you di-in’t”s soon popularized — and normalized — by tabloid talk show audiences. As Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, and the rest of their ilk began to change the TV landscape, my mom’s derision gave way to curiosity, which blossomed into fandom.
When I think of early grade school and all my absences with illness, there was a time when something shifted: my mom stopped watching syndicated sitcoms like Laverne & Shirley, whose theme song we sang along to, and became immersed in trash. She flipped between channels to see who had the best guests or topics and Live with Regis and Kathie Lee rarely stood a chance, not when there were transvestites and psychics and straying spouses and troubled teens everywhere you looked.
As her addiction grew, her standards clattered to the floor: even Richard Bey and Jenny Jones weren’t off the table if she had an itch to scratch in the afternoon. The morning trifecta of Donahue, Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael (which you can now revisit on Pluto) usually won out over the alternatives, including Geraldo, The Montel Williams Show and Maury. In the afternoon there was Another World at 1 pm, followed by Days of Our Lives.
Though I supported her dropping The Young & the Restless for Oprah, I was unsettled when Ricki Lake joined the mix a few years later. Lake’s show, like Maury Povich’s, was popular with my most moronic middle school classmates, none of whom would’ve lasted more than five minutes trying to hang with vintage Donahue. I didn’t like to question whether my mom was on their intellectual wavelength but she didn’t watch Phil’s show anymore, either; he was close to hanging it up and by then she had basic cable at her fingertips.**
There was a slight reprieve from nonstop sleaze in the late ’90s, when Rosie O’Donnell, Donny & Marie Osmond, and Jim J. Bullock & Tammy Faye Messner captured some of the attention she would’ve otherwise given to belligerent prostitutes, boyfriends who cheat with their girlfriends’ mothers (or grandmothers), and paternity test extravaganzas. But a new danger lurked just around the corner, one that’s preoccupied her for most of the last quarter-century: reality television.
Survivor, Big Brother, The Osbournes, The Simple Life, Joe Millionaire, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and The Bachelor were soon to rot her brain worse than The Real World ever did. That several of those wedding-oriented shows aired during the George W. Bush era did little to improve our frosty mother-daughter relations: I couldn’t believe she was voting for politicians who campaigned on not allowing people like me to marry, while hungrily devouring TV shows that made a mockery of marriage.
Then came TLC series about obese polygamist transsexuals with dwarfism, and Billy the Exterminator, and other things of that nature. I see nothing wrong with guilty pleasures, as you can tell from my interest in TV movies, and have watched several installments of Real Housewives franchises at Crankenstein’s behest, just as Former Partner enjoyed Dance Moms and Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. But these shows really did become a problem for my mom, who bickered endlessly with my dad about the 80-hour capacity DV-R he wasn’t supposed to use (lest she miss an episode of Wife Swap or 16 and Pregnant).
Now she’s in so deep with her favorite shows that she knows more about the daily lives of Big Brother and Bachelorette contestants than she does her own kids. Streaming services have only deepened her dependency, spawning content ecosystems of live feeds and after-shows for after-shows; she never has to disengage. The mother I had for the first however many years of my life, the one with a long attention span who schlepped to the library weekly for books, isn’t coming back: she prefers ‘reality TV’ (a misnomer if ever one existed) to real life. For the better part of the last two decades, our conversations have left me feeling a bit like Phil Donahue himself, always poised to ask “Caller, are you there?”
* In tribute to Donahue, here are two of his broadcasts that were particularly significant to many gay viewers: a 1982 discussion about AIDS and a 1990 spotlight on ACT UP.
** I had to wake up early for middle school and my mom insisted on getting up with me. As usual, she needed the TV on: WKRP in Cincinnati and One Day at a Time reruns were her selections. Even at 41, I still associate Loni Anderson, Bonnie Franklin and Pat Harrington Jr. with middle school, and it makes me feel hopelessly old that their names would elicit the same blank stare from my sisters as Beatrice Lillie’s or Edward Everett Horton’s or Lunt and Fontanne.