THE PREMISE of “Dr. Phil,” the new talk show starring Oprah protege Dr. Phil McGraw, is that you can either come on his show and confront your problems, or you can hide in shame. One is the path of courage and change, that most celebrated of goals in talk-show television, and the other is the path of cowardice and personal stagnation. The show’s own map of reality covers what territory lies between these two paths. For obvious reasons, it never crosses anyone’s mind how profoundly abnormal it is to address one’s biggest problems on television. It is as if the people who go on this show (and “Oprah” and many others besides) accept television’s own claim that reality is something that by definition takes place in front of cameras and on a sound stage.
What has me waxing philosophic is the use of real-life video on Dr. Phil’s show. The show’s “real people” allow their screaming and fighting to be videotaped. There’s nothing new about this device of sticking cameras in kitchens and cars for a candid look at what’s going on, nor does it make for bad television. Just the opposite. It is hugely compelling. A mother is driving her two children around in the family minivan. She’s dropping bleeped-out F-Bombs left and right; she’s angry at everything and everyone, but especially her ten-year-old son in the backseat. She’s yelling at him, telling him not to give her that look. He feigns ignorance. She explodes: “You look at me with the hatred in your eyes.”
The delivery of this line is better than anything you’ll see in any movie. It’s incredible. Powerful and artless, it says everything you need to know about this situation: This mother despises her poor ten-year-old son.
Back in the studio, however, the mother is sobbing with contrition. She says she wants to be a good mother and to treat her children well. Dr. Phil says she’s got to stop all the abusive and poisonous theatrics. It’s not subtle, but it’s true. Now, I don’t like the mother. To me she seemed more genuine when she was laying into her kid. Crying in the studio, before a national audience (Dr. Phil’s 3-day-old show is already carried in 96 percent of the country), I don’t buy it at all. But hey, this is not therapy. This a wake-up call, says Dr. Phil.
And here’s how the wake-up call goes. The screaming mom is seated on stage. Behind her there’s a row of twelve television monitors. Her chair, it turns out, is one of those chairs that spins. Dr. Phil spins her to face the first television. It’s a one-second clip of her yelling at her son, “Shut up, Vincent!” The audio has been goosed to give the screaming mom’s voice just an edge of reverb and extra screechiness. Then Phil turns her to the next monitor. Same clip: “Shut up Vincent!” And so on, ten more times: “Shut up, Vincent!”–“Shut up, Vincent!”–“Shut up, Vincent!” . . .
It’s less than a half hour into the first day of “Dr. Phil” and already I feel like I’m witnessing a jump-the-shark moment, that is, the moment when a television show slips too far from its own moorings and drifts into the waters of self-parody.
All the same, “Dr. Phil” is about as good as such a show can be. He’s not as smooth on camera as Master Oprah. His voice goes a bit reedy when he delivers his opening remarks. And he’s a bit wooden for the long full-body shot. But when the camera’s right on top of him, he’s superb. Forceful, decisive, unhesitating, a freshly uncorked bottle of certainty in a world full of relativists.
Of course, it’s never the relativists who thrive in this shut-up-I’m-talking format. Howard Stern, Dr. Laura, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, even Oprah to some degree: They are all, in temperament and beliefs, absolutists.
Dr. Phil’s story is that he was an unsuccessful therapist working in his father’s practice. As he told Newsweek, “I didn’t have the patience for it. People would want to sit there and talk to you for six months, and a lot of times I could figure in the first hour that they just wanted to rent a friend. I’d be sitting there, saying, ‘You know, here’s your problem, you’re a jerk.'”
So Dr. Phil eventually went into corporate litigation. It was in this capacity that he met Oprah. He worked for her on the libel suit she faced from the Texas beef industry. Oprah of course won that suit, and she thanked Dr. Phil by bringing him on her show. Soon enough, the straight-talk Texan was helping Oprah earn her best audience numbers for the week, padding her Neilsen’s average with an extra 24 percent during his weekly Tuesday appearances.
But there is something to be said against Dr. Phil’s brand of therapeutic honesty. In the second segment of the first day, the people in trouble are a young couple with a small child. The video introduction shows the couple fighting over everything from money to how to put things away in the bedroom closet. The wife says into the camera, “I feel as if I made a huge mistake by saying, ‘I do.'” Hedging a little, the husband admits to the camera that a divorce was not unthinkable. On stage, the wife again says she can’t believe she made “this big a commitment.” Dr. Phil focuses on how unprepared they were for marriage, how little they discussed the major issues even though they were living together for years.
Here comes the wake-up call. Dr. Phil asks the wife if she would get married again if she had it to do over. No, she says–bringing to three the number of times she’s said she regrets being married. Dr. Phil asks the husband the same question. He responds that had he known how difficult marriage would be, he would have made sure they had discussed it more thoroughly. Phil says, “Now answer my question,” and so the husband admits that he wouldn’t have married his wife had he it to do over again. How is this any good? Now both the husband and wife are on record (and on television of course) expressing a preference against their marriage. To use a phrase that Dr. Phil favors, words matter. Is he not here instructing the husband and wife to express the opposite of marital love. In his pursuit of all-out honesty, he has them talking like soon-to-be divorcees.
The segment’s not all bad. If nothing else, Dr. Phil is a great hunter of obvious prey. He tells the wife not to nitpick all the time. He tells both husband and wife it’s bad for the child to be fighting all the time. He emphasizes the habits of kindness and warmth and being loving to each other.
Day Two opens with Dr. Phil saying this is “truth television,” but the first guest is Paula Abdul (by video) issuing a fake complaint about this difficult person she works with, the sharp-tongued Brit on “American Idol.” Halfway through the hour, a married couple comes on. The husband is obsessed with his remote control car and pays very little attention to the wife. Husband says: “My dream would be a remote control wife and remote control kids.” He’s perfect for a show like this, a person with a seemingly harmless obsession that says volumes about how he views the world. Also, he’s entirely oblivious to how he’s ruining his marriage. Dr. Phil easily hits a homerun off this fat, slow pitch floating over the middle of the plate. And heck if it ain’t entertaining to watch the husband get reamed by Dr. Phil, though afterwards the guy is visibly seething.
The next segment is just icing on the cake. This husband forgets everything his wife tells him. Recently his wife asked him what her birthday was. The date he gave was the birthday of his ex-wife. Dr. Phil is practically falling out of his chair at this revelation. And so am I. This is almost as good as the guy with the remote control car. Okay, I admit it: Sometimes the human zoo is just so much fun.
Day Three, however, is a total downer. The theme is children with weight problems. First up is a single mom and her 8-year-old daughter, who weighs 125 pounds. In the intro video, the forthright mom tells the kid she’s fat and that’s not acceptable. As with many guests on “Oprah,” the viewer has the feeling that behind this appearance and this particular problem hide years of unresolvable awfulness. Perhaps some of the other guests could easily shape their problems to fit the talk-show narrative. But not children, not real children who haven’t been coached by their parents or other adults on how to present their effed-up lives. With them, the tangles of misery clearly go way beyond the boundaries of TV reality.
The show’s third family with a weight problem also suggests a wild undergrowth of resentment and sadness well beyond the reach of a wake-up call from Dr. Phil. Another single mother, this one with three daughters, ages 16, 13, and 11. The eldest is overweight, the youngest is bulimic, and the middle daughter is perfect–a blond-haired doll in excellent shape, smiling, athletic, indeed, a cheerleader. This is truth as something other than television.
Dr. Phil talks to the youngest about her bulimia. How’d it start? When she was nine, her father told her she was fat. How much did she weigh? 100 pounds. Dr. Phil says that by no objective measure is 100 pounds fat for a nine year old. Her father was wrong. No, interrupts the mother, her father was an “idiot.”
A studio guest told Newsweek for its fawning profile of Dr. Phil that “I am a member of the Church of Oprah and Dr. Phil is my higher power.” In some ways, Dr. Phil is actually an improvement on the Church of Oprah. Less forgiving, more righteous–and he shows no signs of wanting to start a book club. But if I may state the obvious, you’ll have a higher and more realistic opinion of mankind if you don’t pray to the human zoo of talk-show television.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
