Reality Therapy.(talk shows)(Brief Article)

Chicago is the home of the personal talk show. Phil Donahue began there; Oprah, Jenny Jones, and Jerry Springer tape there. But New York, as a national media capital, makes its own contributions to the genre.

The Montel Williams show is shot, like many other TV shows, on the West Side, among the car dealerships north of Hell's Kitchen, in a building with no pretensions. You enter a door in a plain wall, as if you were going to a consignment sale. The reception area and the green rooms occupy leftover spaces and hallways; the focus of the operation is the set. The stage has a few living-room touches-upholstered chairs, side tables. But this living room opens to a sloping bank of seats, with additional seats flanking the stage-an arena.

The host, Montel Williams, has the grace and power of a middleweight. His punches could hurt you, but he's no lumbering carcass; he can run, and he doesn't have to hide. Thirty years ago black men sported fros like the aureoles of Orthodox saints. Montel's handsome smooth head is the current thing in black hair style, and much more compelling. He is assisted by a team of producers, each one working on her own shows (most of the producers are women). They have to stay on their toes because guests cancel at the last minute, or have to be cancelled because, when they show up, their stories have suddenly changed. Even when everyone shows up and has the problems they said they have, there is no script. Three of these open-ended dramas are filmed every day. The guests on the segment I'm watching are mothers and daughters who cannot communicate with each other. They hail from the heartland- anyplace in America that doesn't produce a television show.

Montel's guests come armored in recrimination. A daughter appears and tells her story; her mother appears, with a slightly or vastly different one, and immediately the sparks fly. Montel enters these fracases like a log-splitter. A young woman, her mother, and her mother-in-law are quarreling about who should have custody of the young woman's three little boys. (The father has no say in the matter, because the young woman's husband was murdered when she was 19 years old.) Montel moves in. "There are three boys, who are hearing you three women go, yak-yak-yak-yak. If you keep this up, that is all they will think women do-and seventeen years from now, they will be on this show, for abusing their wives. And don't think I'm joking, because that will happen."

At certain moments, he will turn for help to an in-studio expert, in this case my wife. "Jeanne, Jeanne, Jeanne," he says, after eliciting some tale of horror, "what can we tell these people?" I've been doing gladiatorial TV since the Carter administration, but my expertise is limited to Communism and the GDP. Confronted with a question like this, I would gape like a bass. But Jeanne does just fine. Montel's credo is that actions ...