The new season for daytime TV doesn’t wait until after the Emmys, as prime time does. It jumps right in after Labor Day. Once the kids are in school, boom, time to pop a drink and go to the all day bachelorette’s party that daytime is becoming.
Nobody sets that atmosphere better than Bethenny Frankel, the teeny New Yorker who is all eyes and teeth, who first came to prominence as runner-up on the long-forgotten “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart” and went on to become the chattiest and bitchiest of “the Real Housewives of New York” back when she wasn’t a wife at all. Since then, she’s married, divorced and become a brand in herself, but now she wants to be a daytime not as well.
“It’s not about me!” she insists. But she does all the talking, pretty much; chooses the questions of the “Truth or Dare” type game she’ll probably have going every day called “Would You Ever” and is even in the frame when her musical guest Flo Rida invades and does a hit.
When her own answer to “Would You Ever” is interrupted by “topless men tossing salads,” that bachelorette party is in full swing (and in fact one of the group of guests in Monday’s premiere was an actual bachelor party).
Frankel wants to be frank, but most of the time she comes off as brash. She assembles a panel to find out what men really think (or what two male comics and a model think) and the second question is how often they have sex with their wives. Another is would they be turned off if their partner were into porn. Then there is discussion over whether she means actually in porn or just a fan of it. It’s a little too early for this kind of conversation if there indeed is a time for such a conversation at all on TV.
But don’t stop her party! She got to her candy-colored set full of approving women (and not one guy) in the audience via Ellen DeGeneres, who is listed as producer. But that show is “Charlie Rose” in content compared to this gaudy trifle.
But maybe Bethenny isn’t as out of line as I thought. On the season premiere of “The View” it seemed like half the questions were about sex or twerking as well, or some kind of odd lechery involving male behinds, one that reached nearly harassment levels with guest Donnie Wahlberg. But since Wahlberg was introduced as the person dating new “View” panelist Jenny McCarthy it was seen as all OK, or all in the family (which may seem a little more weird).
The first show back after a summer off was all about the new member McCarthy, who may be a fine replacement for mean little Republican Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whose earlier credential was being a contestant on “Survivor.” McCarthy is sharp and quick, and maybe too quick for these old gals on the panel. More than once she had to say “just kidding” about one of her jokes.
McCarthy also has her own peculiar blinders, particularly her unproven notion that inoculations cause autism. Many protested having this public health hazard on TV every day. But the first day didn’t include any of that (or any questioning of her on that notion, famously picked up by cuckoo candidate Michele Bachmann).
McCarthy mostly looks like she’s biting her tongue, or telling herself she could do this whole show herself (she tried — on a late night update of the “Playboy After Dark” format on E!).
She does bring down the average age of the panel (and the room – this is clearly a middle aged audience compared to the one for Bethenny which may have been handpicked) and is handy to answer embarrassing questions as when Barbara Walters said, “What is a hashtag anyway?”
More than adding a cast member, this season of “The View” is about the last year of Barbara Walters on TV, and it seems like they’ll be mentioning it every day of the season.
To kick off the long goodbye they had Michael Buble warble a song to her, a kind of cougar fantasy that seemed a little creepy. But the audience got a free copy of Buble’s CD (and a new View coffee cup!) so they were cool with it.
The other new daytime show I watched Monday was a doozie. It’s called “The Test” and is not a quiz show at all. Instead, it’s another one of those déclassé raucous family-fighting shows along the lines of “Maury,” “Jerry Springer” and “Steve Wilkos” that actually now has its own genre name: conflict talk show.
This one de-emphasizes the personality in charge — Kirk Fox, an Ichabod Crane of a guy who has been seen briefly as the sanitation guy on “Parks and Recreation” — and culminates in a test. Not just a DNA test, as Maury Povich has been specializing, but also lie detector tests.
Unlike the previous three shows — which are all all shot in the same theater in Stamford, Conn., of all places — this one is in California, which invites a whole new brand of crazy. The show they picked as the premiere had a guy who supposedly choked his wife, burned down his sister in law’s house, and is denying paternity of their child. All of them talked crazy Southern patois for an hour when they weren’t exploding into a brawls that tumbled across the stage. The security crew seemed very slow to break these fights up. It is, after all, their bread and butter. (The first day audience had a look of dazed bemusement and disbelief).
As a host, Fox stands out for his humor — “Why do you have a tire in your bedroom?” “Put your shoes back on” he said at various odd times. But that kind of slacker commentary undercuts his supposedly serious intent: We have to talk this out!
Also, he is completely unable to calm the situation or control the shoe. Or maybe he’s not supposed to. The fights just rage on until each commercial break. It’s an embarrassment for all involved — the host, the audience, the stations who carry it, the predatory lawyers who advertise, the now tattered and tawdry Tribune Company and CBS Television Distribution.
It makes the shirtless male models and cocktails of “Bethenny” seem almost civilized.