A talk show is quite clearly and self-consciously built around its talk. To remain on the air in commercial television, a talk show must adhere to strict time and money constraints-allowing time,  for  instance, for the advertising spots that must appear throughout the show. The talk show must begin and end within these rigid time limits and, playing to an audience of millions, be highly tuned to topics that will interest that mass audience. For its business managers, the television talk show is one product among many, and these managers are usually not amenable to anything that will interfere with profits and ratings. Finally, this kind of show is almost always anchored by a host or team of hosts.

Host/Forms

     Talk shows are often identified by the host's name in the title, an indication of the importance of the host in the history of the television talk show. A good example of the importance of the host to the form a talk show takes would be The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show premiered on NBC in 1954 with Steve Allen as its first host. While it maintained a distinctive format and style throughout its first four decades on the air, The Tonight Show changed significantly with each successive host. Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson each took The Tonight Show in a significant new direction, as did its current host, Jay Leno. Each of these hosts imprinted the show with distinctive personalities and management styles.

     Although many talk shows run for only weeks or months before being taken off the air, once established, talk shows and talk-show hosts tend to have long runs. The average number of years on television for the 35 major American talk-show hosts listed at the end of this essay was 18 years. Successful talk show hosts such as Mike Wallace, Johnny Carson, and Barbara Walters bridge generations of viewers. The longevity of these "superstars" increases their impact on the forms and formats of television talk with which they are associated.

     Television talk shows originally emerged out of two central traditions: news and entertainment. Over time, hybrid forms developed that mixed news, public affairs, and entertainment. These hybrid forms occupy a middle-ground position between news and entertainment, although their hosts (Phil Donahue, Oprah Win­frey, and Geraldo Rivera, for example) often got their training in journalism. Approximately one-third of the major talk-show hosts listed at the end of the essay came out of the news. The other two-thirds came from entertainment (comedy in particular).

     Within the journalistic tradition, the names Edward R. Murrow, Mike Wallace, Ted Koppel, and Bill Moy­ers stand out. News-talk hosts such as Murrow, Kop­pel, and Moyers do not have bands, sidekicks, or a studio audience. Their roles as talk-show hosts are extensions of their roles as reporters and news commentators. Their shows appear in the evening, when more middle-aged and older-aged viewers are watching. The morning host teams that mix "happy talk" and information also often come from a news background. This format was pioneered by NBC's Sylvester "Pat" Weaver and host Dave Garroway with the Today show in the early 1950s. Hosts who started out on early­ morning news-talk shows and went on to anchor the evening news or prime-time interview shows include Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Barbara Walters, Tom Brokaw, and Jane Pauley. Each developed a distinctive style within the more conversational format of her or his morning show.

     Coming from a journalism background but engaging in a wider arena of cultural topics are hosts such as Donahue, Winfrey, and Rivera. Mixing news, entertainment, and public affairs, Donahue established "talk television," an extension of the "hot topic" live radio call-in shows of the I 960s. Donahue himself ran a radio show in Dayton, Ohio, before premiering his daytime television talk show there. Donahue's Dayton show, later syndicated nationally, featured audience members talking about the social issues that affected their lives.

     Within the field of entertainment/variety talk, it was the late-night talk show that assumed special importance. Late-night talk picked up steam when it garnered national attention during the talk-show "wars"  of the late I 960s and early 1970s. During this time, Carson defended his ratings throne on The Tonight Show against challengers Joey Bishop, David Frost, Dick Cavett, and Merv Griffin. Late-night talk-show wars again received front-page headlines when Carson's successors, Leno, David Letterman, Chevy Chase, Arsenio Hall, Dennis Miller, and others engaged in fierce ratings battles after Carson's retirement. Within the United States these talk-show wars assumed epic proportions in the press, and the impact that late-night entertainment talk-show hosts had over their audiences seemed, at times, to assume that of political leaders or leaders of state. In an age in which political theorists had become increasingly pessimistic about the possibilities of democracy within the public sphere, late-night talk-show hosts became sanctioned court jesters who appeared free to mock and question basic American values and political ideas through humor. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Car­son’s monologue on The Tonight  Show  was considered a litmus test of public opinion, a form  of commentary on the news. Leno and Letterman comic commentary continued the tradition.

     At times of crisis. the limitation of the court jester's role within commercial television sometimes becomes more evident. This happened when Bill Maher made a joke on ABC's late-night talk show Politically Incorrect after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. His joke was in the form of a question that asked how much courage it took to bomb radical Islamic guerrilla fighters hiding in caves from a strategic fighter jet thousands of feet in the air. The joke brought down a firestorm of outrage on Maher. including threats from advertisers to cancel their commercials and refusals by local stations!- to air the show. although there were some who defended the host's right to make the joke. and even an email campaign in his support. After the events of September 11, at least from the point of view of commercial broadcasting. the freedom to make jokes only extended so far. and many comedy writers and talk-show hosts curtailed their jokes about President George W. Bush and his administration during this time.

     The ratings battle between Leno and Letterman in the early 1990s echoed the earlier battles between Car­son, Cavett, and Griffin. But it is not just comic ability that has been demanded of the late-night hosts. They must possess a lively, quick-paced interview technique, a persistent curiosity arising directly from their comic worldviews, lively conversational skills, and an ability to listen to and elicit information from a wide range of show business and "civilian" guests. It is no wonder that a relatively small number of 1990s hosts survived more than a few years on the air to become stars. Indeed. in all categories of the television talk show over four decades on the air. fewer than three dozen news and entertainment talk show hosts in the United States have achieved the status of stars.

Talk Formats

     While talk-show hosts represent a potpourri of styles and approaches, the number of talk-show formats is actually quite limited. For example, a general-interest hard-news or public-affairs show can be built around an expert panel (such as Washington Week in Review), a panel and news figure (Meet the Press). a magazine format for a single topic (Nightline), a magazine format that deals with multiple topics (60 Minutes), or a one-on-one host-guest interview (Moyers's World of Ideas). These are the standard formats for the discussion of hard-news topics. Similarly, a general-interest soft-news talk show that mixes entertainment. news. and public affairs can also be built around a single topic (such as Donahue. Oprah, or Geraldo), a magazine multiple-topic format (Today, Good Morning America), or a one-on-one host-guest interview (Bar­ bara Walters's interview specials). There are also special-interest news/information formats that  focus on such subjects as economics (Wall Street Week), sports (Sports Club), homemaking/fashion (Ern West­ more Show), personal psychology (Dr.Ruth), home repair (This Old House), literature (Author Meets the Critic), and cooking (Julia Child's programs).

     Entertainment talk shows are represented by a simi­larly limited number of formats. By far the most prevalent is the informal, celebrity-guest/host talk show. which takes on different characteristics depending on when in the day it is broadcast. The late-night entertainment talk show. with the publicity it received through the "talk-show wars," grew rapidly in popularity among viewers during its first four decades on the air. There have also been morning versions of the informal, host-guest entertainment variety show  (such as the Will Rodgers Jr. Show). daytime versions (The Robert  Q.  Lewis  Show),  and  special  topic  versions ( American    Bandstand).   Some   entertainment  talk shows have featured comedy through satirical takes on talk shows (Fernwood Tonight, The Larry Sanders Show), monologues (The Henry Morgan Show), or comedy dialogue ( Dave and Charley). Some game shows have been built sufficiently around their talk so that they are arguably talk shows in disguise (Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, for instance). There are also a whole range of shows that are not conventionally known as "talk shows" but feature "fresh" talk and are built primarily around that talk. These shows center on social encounters or events adapted to television, such as a religious service (Life Is Worth Living), an academic seminar (Seminar), a talent contest (Talent Scouts), a practical joke (Candid Camera), mating rituals (The Dating Game), a forensic event (People's Court), or a mixed social event (House Party). The line between "television talk" and what formally constitutes a talk show is often not easy to draw and shifts over time as new forms of television talk emerge.

Cycles of Talk: The History of the Television Talk Show

     Although new hosts and talk shows in the United States often appear in rapid succession, usually following expansion cycles in the industry, significant changes in television talk occur more slowly. These changes have traditionally come about at the hands of a relatively small number of influential talk-show hosts and programmers, and have occurred within distinct periods of television history.

     The term "talk show" was a relatively late invention, coming into use in the mid- 1960s, but shows based on various forms of more-or-less spontaneous talk were a staple of broadcasting from its earliest days. Radio talk shows of one kind or another made up 24 percent of all radio programming  from  1927  to 1956, with general-variety talk, audience­ participation, human interest, and panel shows comprising as much as 40 to 60 percent of the daytime schedule. Network television from 1949 to 1973 filled over half its daytime program hours with talk programming, devoting 15 to 20 percent of its evening schedule to talk shows of one kind or another. As the networks went into decline, their viewership dropping from 90 percent to 65 percent of the audience between the 1980s and the 1990s, talk shows were one form of programming that continued to expand on the networks and in syndication. By the summer of 1993, the television page of USA Today listed 17 talk shows and local papers as 27. In all, from 1948 to 1993, more than 200 talk shows appeared on the air. These shows can be broken down into four cycles of television talk-show history, which correspond to four major periods of television history itself.

     The first cycle took place from 1948 to 1962 and featured such hosts as Godfrey, Garroway, Murrow, Arlene Francis, and Paar. These hosts had extensive radio experience before coming to television, and they were the founders of television talk. During this time, the talk show's basic forms-coming largely out of previous radio and stage traditions-took shape.

     The second cycle covers the period from 1962 to 1972, when the networks took over from sponsors and advertising agencies as the dominant forces in talk programming. A small but vigorous syndicated talk industry grew during this period as well. In the 1960s and early 1970s, three figures established themselves on the U.S. networks as talk hosts with staying power: Carson, Walters, and Wallace. Each was associated with a program that became an established profit center for its network, and each used that position to negotiate a sustained status with the network that propelled her or him into the 1970s and 1980s as a star of television talk.

     The third cycle of television talk lasted from 1970 to 1980. During this decade, challenges to network domination arose from a number of quarters. While the networks themselves were initiating a few new talk shows by 1969, syndicated talk programming exploded. Twenty new talk shows went on the air in 1969 (until then, the average number of new shows rarely exceeded five per year). It was a boom period for television talk-and the time of the  first  nationally publicized "talk-show wars." New technologies of production (cheaper television studios and production costs), new methods of distribution (satellite transmission and cable), and key regulatory decisions by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made nationally syndicated talk increasingly profitable and attractive to investors.

     Talk show hosts such as Donahue took advantage of the situation. Expanding his program from 40 markets in 1974 to a national audience of 167 markets in 1979, Donahue became the number one syndicated talk­ show host in the United States by the late 1970s. Other new talk-show hosts entered the field as well. Bill Moyers' Journal went on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1970, and William Buckley's Firing Line, which had appeared previously in syndication, launched on PBS a year later. Both Moyers and Buckley-representing liberal and conservative viewpoints, respectively-were to remain significant figures on public broadcasting for the next two decades. During this time, independent stations and station groups, first-run syndication, cable, and VCRs all began to weaken the networks' once invincible hold over national audiences.

     The fourth cycle of television talk took place in the period from 1980 to 1992, a period that has been commonly referred to as the "post-network" era. Don­ ahue's success in syndication was emulated by others, most notably Winfrey, whose Donahue-style audience­ participation show went into national syndication in 1986. Winfrey set a new record for syndication earnings, grossing over $100 million per year from the start of her show's syndication. She became, financially, the most successful talk show host on television.

     But since the early 1980s the networks had been vigorously fighting back. CBS's Late Night with David Letterman and Koppel's Nightline on ABC were two network attempts to win hack audiences. Both shows gained steady ratings over time and established Koppel and Letterman as stars of television talk.

     A fifth cycle of talk was represented by the rise of a series of new talk-show hosts who gained large followings. By the mid- I 990s, "trash talk" had become increasingly popular, and Ricki Lake, one of the first syndicated talk-show hosts to capitalize on this form, had been outdistanced by Jerry Springer, who took this carnivalesque form of TV talk, supported by a clever multimedia merchandising strategy, to new levels of grotesquerie. Also in the 1990s, Rosie O'Donnell reestablished the warm, "family" tradition of the daytime talk show pioneered by the comfortable daytime syndicated talk-show hosts of the 1970s (Dinah Shore, Griffin, and Mike Douglas). Garry Shandling took the self-reflexive traditions of TV talk developed by Letterman to a new level in The Larry Sanders Show, mixing fictional and improvisational forms of TV talk. And Maher took his successful Comedy Central fusion of news talk and comedy, Politically Incorrect, to a regular berth on ABC after Koppel's Nightline. The audiences were treated to other mixtures and experiments: shows such as The Man Show, which satirized male gender roles (or celebrated them, depending on your point of view), or The View, featuring veteran talk star Walters but representing a successful experiment of five women hosting a show collectively. The 1990s, as the above examples indicate, were a time in which new forms, blends, mixtures, and experiments made an appearance among the tried-and-true formulas of television talk.

Paradigm Shifts in Late-Night Entertainment: Carson to Letterman

     Johnny Carson, for 30 years the "King of Late Night," and his successor, David Letterman, are in many ways alike. Their rise to fame could be described by the same basic story. A young man from the American heartland comes to the city, making his way through its absurdities and frustrations with feckless humor. This exemplary middle America is "square" and at the same time sophisticated; innocent, though also ironic and irreverent. Straddling the worlds of common sense and show business, the young man becomes a national jester-and is so anointed by the press.

     The "type" Carson and Letterman represent can be traced to earlier archetypes: the "Yankee" character in early  American  theater  and  the "Toby" character  of 19th-century tent repertory. Carson brought his version of this character to television at the end of the Eisenhower and beginning of the Kennedy era, poking fun at American consumerism and politics in the late 1950s and 1960s.

     Letterman brought his own version of this sharp­ eyed American character to the television screen two decades later, at the beginning of the Reagan era. By this time the youth revolts of the 1960s and 1970s were already on the wane, and Letterman replaced the politics of confrontation represented by the satire of such shows as Saturday Night live and SCTV with a politics of accommodation, removal, and irony. His ironic stance was increasingly acknowledged as capturing the "voice" of his generation and, whether as cause or effect, Letterman became a generational symbol.

     The shift from Carson to Letterman represented not only a cultural change but a new way of looking at television as a medium. Carson's camera was rooted in the neutral gaze of the proscenium-arch tradition; Let­terman's camera, by contrast, roamed wildly and flamboyantly through the studio. Carson acknowledged the camera with sly asides; Letterman's constant, neurotic intimacy with the camera, characterized by his habit of moving right up to the lens and speaking directly into it, represented a new level of self-consciousness about the medium. He extended the "self-referentiality" that Carson himself had promoted over the years on his talk show. Indeed, Letterman represented a movement from what has been called a transparent form of television-the viewer taking for granted, and looking through, the forms of television (camera, lighting, switching, and so on to an opaque form, in which the technology and practices of the medium itself become a focus of the show. Letterman changed late­ night talk forever with his postmodern irreverence and mocking play with the forms of television talk.

Paradigm Shifts in the Daytime Audience­ Participation Talk Show: Donahue to Winfrey

     When Oprah Winfrey rose to national syndication success in 1986 by challenging Phil Donahue in major markets across the United States and winning ratings victories in many of these markets, she did not change the format of the audience-participation talk show. That remained essentially as Donahue had established it 20 years before. What changed was the cultural dynamics of this kind of show, and that shift was in turn a direct reflection of the person who hosted it.

     The ratings battle that ensued in 1986 was between, on the one hand, a black woman raised by a religious grandmother and strict father within the fold of a black church in the South, and on the one, and a white, male, liberal, Catholic Midwesterner who had gone to the University of Notre Dame and been permanently influenced by the women's movement. Just as Jackie Robinson had broken professional baseball's color barrier four decades earlier, Winfrey broke the color line for national television talk show hosts in 1986. Like the hero of a children's story by Horatio Alger, she became one of the great rags-to-riches successes of the 1980s (by the early 1990s, People Weekly was proclaiming her "the richest woman in show business," with an estimated worth of $200 million), and as Arse­ nio Hall and Bob Costas ended their six- and seven­ year runs on talk television in the early 1990s, it became clear that Oprah Winfrey had staying power. She remained one of the few prominent talk show hosts of the 1980s to survive within the cluttered talk­ show landscape of the mid- 1990s, and now into the 21st century.

     Several factors contributed to this success. For one thing, Winfrey had a smart management team and a full-press, national marketing campaign to catapult her into competition with Donahue. The national syndication deal had been worked out by Winfrey's representative, attorney-manager Jeffrey Jacobs, and thanks to management at her show's distributor, King World, her marketing plan was a classic one. Executives at King World believed the media would pounce on "a war with Donahue," so they created one. The first step was to send tapes of Winfrey's shows to "focus groups" in several localities to see how they responded. The results were positive. The next step was to show tapes to selected station groups-small network alliances of a half-dozen or more stations under a single owner. These groups would be offered exclusive broadcast rights. As the reactions began to come in, King World adjusted its tactics. Rather than making blanket offers, they decided to open separate negotiations in each city and market. The gamble paid off. Winfrey's track record proved her a hot-enough commodity to win better deals through individual station negotiation.

     To launch Winfrey on the air, King World kicked off a major advertising campaign. Media publications trumpeted The Oprah Winfrey Show's ratings victories over Donahue in Baltimore and Chicago. The "Donahue-buster" strategy was tempered by Winfrey herself, who worked hard not to appear too arrogant or conceited. When asked about head-on competition with Donahue, she replied that in a majority of markets she did not compete with him directly, and that while Donahue would certainly remain "the king," she just wanted to be "a part of the monarchy." By the time The Oprah Winfrey Show went national in September 1986, it had been picked up by more than 180 stations-approaching Donahue's 200-plus.

     In addition to refined marketing and advertising techniques, cultural issues also featured prominently in Winfrey's campaign. Winfrey's role as talk-show host was inseparable from her identity as an African­ American woman. Her African-American heritage and roots surfaced frequently in press accounts. One critic described her in a 1986 Spy magazine article as "capacity fully built, black, and extremely noisy." These and other comments on her "black" style were not lost on Winfrey. She confronted the issue of race constantly and was very conscious of her image as an African­ American role model.

     When a USA Today reporter queried Winfrey bluntly about the issue of race in August 1986, asking her, "as someone who is not pencil-thin, white, nor blond," how she was "transcending barriers that have hindered many in television," Winfrey replied as follows:

I've been able to do it because my race and gender have never been an issue for me. I've been blessed in knowing who I am, and I am a part of a great legacy. I've crossed over on the backs of Sojourner Truth, and Har­riet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Madam C.J. Walker. Because of them I can now soar. Because of them I can now live the dream.

     Winfrey's remarks represent the "double-voiced" identity of many successful African-American public figures. Such figures, according to Henry Louis Gates, demonstrate their "own membership in the human community and then ... resistance to that community." In the mid-1980s, then, the image of Winfrey as national talk-show host played against both white and black systems of values and aesthetics. It was her vitality as a double sign, not simply her role as an Horatio Alger figure, that made her compelling to a national audience in the United States.

     In the late 1990s and into the new century, a number of new talk-show hosts emerged. Two hosts who began their careers on the cable channel Comedy Central, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, gained increasing national visibility around this time. As noted previously, Maher moved his Politically Incorrect show to a late-night time slot on ABC. As host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, Stewart has received many accolades, including a "talk show host of the year" award from Time magazine and a Peabody Award for his comedy news coverage of the 2000 elections. In daytime talk, Rosie O'Donnell's entry into the increasingly crowded daytime talk market employed a national syndication marketing campaign that was reminiscent of Win­ frey's, and probably learned from it. O'Donnell created a strong following immediately after appearing on the air in 1996 and maintained it through the 1990s. In 2002 news that O'Donnell was gay, and openly so, did not seem to damage her show or her relationship with her national audience, but O'Donnell nevertheless chose to make that year her last on as a talk-show host. In news talk, Katie Couric, who had been co­ anchor of the Today show since the early 1990s, signed a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract in 2002 that put her in the superstar category. Couric's life off­ camera (the death of her husband, her single-mother status, and her high-profile relationship with producer Tom Werner) helped stimulate interest in her career from fans and network executives. The personal lives of female hosts-Winfrey, O'Donnell, and Couric, for example-all seemed to receive more attention than those of their male peers.

Conclusion

     Talk shows have become increasingly important on U.S. television and their hosts are increasingly influential. They speak to cultural ideas and ideals as forcefully as politicians or educators. National talk-show hosts become surrogates for the citizens. Interrogators on the news or clown princes and jesters on entertainment talk shows, major television hosts have a license to question and mock-as long as they play within the rules. An investigation of the American television talk show must, finally. delineate and examine those rules.

     The first governing principle of the television talk show is that everything that occurs on the show is framed by the host, who characteristically has a high degree of control over both the show and the production team. From a production point of view, the host is the managing editor; from a marketing point of view, the host is the label that sells the product; from a power and organizational point of view, the host's star value is the fulcrum of  power in contract  negotiations with advertisers, network executives, and syndicators. Without a "brand-name" host, a show may continue, but it will not be the same.

     A second principle of the television talk show is that it is experienced in the present tense. This is true whether the show is live or taped in front of a studio audience and shown as if live a few hours later. Live, taped, or shown in "reruns," talk shows are conducted, and viewers participate in them, as if host, guest, and viewer occupy the same moment.

     As social texts, television talk shows are highly sensitive to the topics of their social and cultural moment. These topics may concern passing fashions or connect to deeper preoccupations. References to the O.J. Simpson trial on television talk shows in the mid- 1990s, for example, reflected a preoccupation in the United States with domestic violence and issues of gender, race, and class. Talk shows are, in this sense, social histories of their times.

     While it is host-centered, occurring in a real or imagined present tense, sensitive to the historical moment, and based on a form of public/private intimacy, the television talk show is also a commodity. Talk shows traditionally have been cheap to produce. In 1992 a talk show cost less than $100,000 (compared to up to $1 million or more for a prime-time drama of the same length). By the early 1990s developments in video technology made talk shows even more economical to produce and touched off a wave of new talk shows on the air. Still, the rule of the marketplace prevailed. A joke on Carson's final episode of The Tonight Show that contained 75 words and ran 30 seconds was worth approximately $150,000-the cost to  advertisers of a 30-second "spot" on that show. Each word of the joke cost approximately $2,000. Although the rates of Carson's last show were particularly high, commercial time on television is always expensive, and an industry of network and station "reps," time buyers and sellers work constantly to negotiate and manage the cost of talk commodities on the television market. If a talk show makes money over time, its contract will likely be renewed. If it does not, no matter how valuable or critically acclaimed it may be, it will be pulled from the air. A commodity so valuable must be carefully managed and planned. It must fit the commercial imperatives and time limits of for-profit television. Although it can be entertaining, even "outrageous," it must never seriously alienate advertisers or viewers.

     As we can see from the examples above, talk shows are shaped by many hands and guided by a clear set of principles. These rules are so well known that hosts, guests, and viewers rarely stop to think about them. What appears to be one of television's most unfettered and spontaneous forms turns out to be, on closer investigation, one of its most complex and, occasionally, artful creations.