I don’t know about you but I first learned that talk shows have writers during the recent writers’ strike. Sure, I knew there were teleprompters and scripts involved. I just believed the scripts were penned by a talk show’s host. How nice it must be to talk for a living without having to think of anything to say. People expect as much of actors. But an actor’s script is a tool with which he creates a character in order to tell a story. A talk show host has a unique role in television entertainment in that he or she engages the audience in a discussion. TV hosts are not marketed to their audiences as actors, but as “television personalities.” Only we are not told whose personality we’re getting.
Hosts, it seems, are a composite of the personalities that populate their writing teams. What results is a sort of alter-ego, based on the host but blending the humor, wit and imagination of any number of faceless writing professionals. The collaboration is meant to make up in entertainment what it lacks in authenticity.
There is nothing wrong with all of this. For the writers, the system is certainly profitable, if not altogether equitable. Still, it is not without a sense of disillusionment that I accept how talk shows work. After all, it is one thing to peek behind the wizard’s curtain and find a man. It is another thing to find that man standing before yet another curtain.
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