I spent New Year’s Day recuperating with a few of my favorite things: Bloody Marys, good friends, gossip, delicious pasta, and mind-numbingly bad film. The Biscuit and I, having downed enough room-temperature champagne and stayed up until a debauched enough hour to convince ourselves that we hadn’t gotten too old, fell out of bed in the early afternoon feeling very elderly indeed, but we dressed warmly and headed to Brooklyn for Bean’s Second Annual “Live From Death’s Door” New Year’s Day Recovery Soiree. We reviewed the highlight film of bad behavior from the previous evening, we invented a new drink (the Heavy-Petting Mary – just a splash of vodka, no celery stick), and we loaded our plates with Boy Wonder’s spaghetti and meatballs and settled down in front of a neutron-bomb double feature: Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls and Showgirls. Thus fortified by the knowledge that other people not only had far surpassed our various New Year’s embarrassments in their ability to make complete and utter fools of themselves, but had also committed said exploits to celluloid for our viewing pleasure, we wended our way home, repeating lines like, “You dig it, you little FREAK!” to each other and giggling.

After coming back to my apartment, I brushed my teeth and washed my face and emerged from the bathroom, hoping to find the Biscuit in bed reading a book and, more importantly, getting the sheets warmed up for me. Alas, I found the bed empty. Once again the siren song of basic cable, which he can’t quite bring himself to pay for in his own apartment, had lured him into a slumped position on my couch. I strolled by the TV, anticipating the usual migraine-inducing strobe-like progression through the channels that defines the experience of “watching” television with the Biscuit, but he had actually settled on one program for a minute or two – namely, the E! Channel’s Behind The Scenes look at Jerry Springer. Soon I found myself slouched next to the Biscuit, deep in the throes of more bad art and fascinated by what I saw on the screen. What sucked me in – the hair-pulling, chair-chucking, bitch-slapping, epithet-snapping guests? The moonlighting Chicago cops with upper arms larger than my head, wading calmly into fray after fray and prying people apart? The naked glee of the audience? The unflappable Springer himself? No, the clips from the show didn’t interest me nearly as much as the priggish scolding Springer got from a snotty TV Guide scribe named Mark Schwed.

After the obligatory shots of scrawny men with scrawnier mustaches tussling with each other, the Behind The Scenes narrator intoned something to the effect of, “But Springer’s high ratings haven’t endeared him to critics.” Schwed, obviously trying for a tone of dismissive condescension and just as obviously tripping over his disproportionately bitter contempt for overweight people from the Midwest, let Springer have it with both barrels, calling him irresponsible and more or less accusing him of pimping his guests for their outrageous stories. Then he opened fire on the show’s guests, whom he described as pathetic and desperate and whom he charged with not telling the truth. Schwed went on to blame the show for encouraging violence and promoting unsavory lifestyles. All told, the man used the phrase “people like that” no fewer than six times. “People like that”? I hope Lorrie Moore will forgive me for taking her line out of context, but Mr. Schwed, this is America – “people like that” are the only people here.

Now, before I wheel over the library ladder so that Mr. Schwed can get over himself, I have a couple of confessions to make. First, I kind of like Springer. I don’t actively seek the show out, but if I surf past it, I’ll stop. I’ve learned a couple of pretty good comebacks, like “time to take the trash out” and “why don’t you waddle over here and say that to my face?” I’ve picked up a few handy tips on how to comport myself in a chickfight should the situation ever arise; the strait-laced girls’ school I attended didn’t really cover this in the curriculum, but now I know to 1) grab a hunk of teased hair, 2) yank downwards, and 3) start kicking. I find the irrelevance of sexual orientation refreshing; nobody seems to care if guys dress as girls, or if girls sleep with other girls. They just want the third point of the triangle to rush out onto the stage, windmilling his or her arms and cursing furiously under cover of the omnipresent “bleeeeeep.” And I like Jerry’s little thought of the day at the end. In fact, I like Jerry’s whole attitude towards the proceedings; he seems to feel that people will act out on their miserable situations anyway, so they might as well do it on his show. He gets the ratings, they get two days in a Chicago hotel room for free, and everyone goes to bed happy.

Second, I appeared on Ricki a few years ago, on an “I Have A Secret To Tell You” show. If any of you saw an episode of Ricki aired in March 1995, in which a girl named Alice confessed to her friend Kimberley that her (Alice’s) boyfriend had run over her (Kimberley’s) dog with his Buick Skylark and thrown it into a lake instead of having it put down humanely as Alice had asked him to, because Kimberley had asked her to do it but she didn’t have time, and then Alice’s boyfriend took her (Alice) out to a nice dinner with the money he should have spent having Pepper (the dog) cremated, and then Alice broke up with him (the boyfriend) when she found out what he had done but didn’t tell Kimberley why, or what had happened . . . UNTIL TODAY . . . you actually saw me (“Alice”) pulling a whole sheep’s worth of wool over the eyes of not only Ricki but three of her producers, and Dr. Joyce Brothers too. I should have gotten an Emmy for that performance – I had animal-rights activist Ricki and several members of the audience in TEARS, with a story that bore only the most distant relationship to reality. So I guess I don’t have to tell you that I don’t have too many illusions about talk shows, and I certainly don’t understand why people like Mark Schwed get all worked up about Springer and programs of its ilk.

Mr. Schwed’s affronted denunciation of Springer guests as liars, for example, strikes me as hopelessly naÔve. Of COURSE they lied. I lied to get onto Ricki, the punk chick named Aurelius that I shared smokes and coffee with had lied to get onto Ricki, and two of the other three pairs of secret-sharing friends had lied to get onto Ricki. If people want to get on TV – or to New York for free – badly enough, they will lie. The producers do a reasonably thorough job of vetting the stories, but they have to tape something, so if they don’t have guests who will the truth, they go with the ones who can put on a good show. Besides, these shows aim to entertain, not to bring “serious” journalism to the people, and while they claim to showcase true stories, they do so with the same wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude of the WWF. Mr. Schwed apparently holds talk shows to the same high standard as Walter Cronkite, but since the shows themselves don’t aspire to that kind of credibility – and since so-called “news” programs like Dateline NBC have taken their share of hits for manipulating stories in recent years – he fails to make his point.

As for Jerry’s so-called “irresponsibility,” um, give me a bucket. Since when have we as a culture started looking to television as a bastion of responsibility? Yes, a lot of people watch a lot of TV, and yes, children tend to believe – and be heavily influenced by – what they see on TV. But the “responsibility” for that lies with the viewers themselves or with their parents, not with programmers and producers, and if Mr. Schwed dislikes what he sees on Springer, he can take responsibility for his own remote control and change the bloody channel, but calling Jerry Springer “irresponsible” conveniently begs this question. If he wants to pass judgment, fine; he reviews TV shows for a living, after all. But he should maintain a modicum of consistency and indict most of the rest of TV at the same time. Beverly Hills, 90210 consistently infuriated me with its portrayal of women as spineless betties, and recent episodes of Dawson’s Creek have given the stigmatization of mental illness new life, but while yucky attitudes like this kind of piss me off, I don’t think the creators have a “responsibility” to make better or more fulfilling television. Why doesn’t Mr. Schwed just call the producers of Knight Rider onto the carpet too? I mean, we all know cars don’t really talk, right? Like, way to comprehend the synergies of the entertainment industry, Marky. Not. If you want responsible TV, watch PBS – the government and the public support PBS, and public television does owe you an accounting. Springer doesn’t. Neither do Baywatch or Home Improvement or any of the other dreck posing as wholesome or worthwhile entertainment on TV these days.

But Mr. Schwed probably doesn’t have a problem with Baywatch. (Or maybe he does, but they didn’t ask him to comment on that.) See, when someone calls for a movie or TV show to “take responsibility,” it usually means that something about the movie or TV show has offended them, something they don’t want to admit has offended them. It usually means that it has some blood in it, or some sex scenes, or some gay people, or some tacky fat people from Wisconsin talking about wife-swapping and getting into fistfights. I would bet American dollars that Mr. Schwed wouldn’t have his panties in nearly as tight a wad about Springer if Jerry interviewed a bunch of penny loafer-wearing sourballs named Muffy and Brad about the pressures of the polo circuit. Jerry constantly protests that his critics have elitist motives for bashing his show, and I have to agree with him; Mr. Schwed objects not to the show per se, but to having to look at ugly poor people. I could have that wrong, and I won’t hold my breath waiting for him to cop to it, but some people do watch the show solely to laugh at the frumpy guests and say stuff like, “As IF that chick could get ONE man, much less two.” I’ve said those things myself. Nope, not charitable, but at least I admit it – Mr. Schwed just pretends he feels sorry for “people like that” and ridicules them for going on TV to solve their problems, when he alone doesn’t get the joke.

I wouldn’t call Springer good TV. If I had kids, I don’t think I’d let them watch it. But I wouldn’t let them watch it because I wouldn’t want them to think that grown-ups can hit each other to work things out, and because I know kids can lip-read a bleeped word just as well as a grown-up can – not because I put a value judgment on the guests. Maybe Jerry does encourage bad behavior, and maybe he does know his guests lie through the teeth they have left, and maybe he even uses the more outrageously outrÈ guests in order to hold our attention. But it works. The people have spoken, and the people like Jerry and his show, for various reasons – not just “people like that,” either, but all kinds of people. If Mr. Schwed finds “people like that” revolting, he should have the stones to come out and say it: “I, Mark Schwed, begrudge my inferior, uneducated, domestic beer-drinking fellow Americans the right to their fifteen minutes of fame.” But he never will, because several million “people like that” read TV Guide every week. He’ll just keep pretending to worry about pre-millennium syndrome and artistic accountability, while sneaking peeks down his hypocritical wimpy nose at the so-called white trash that could probably beat the crap out of him (chicks included).

I like Springer because I like to laugh at movies and TV that suck. Why does Mr. Schwed dislike Springer? Because he doesn’t care if people in Michigan exist, as long as he doesn’t have to look at them.

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