First I was distressed. They took the Today show off Second Avenue. You know, I have my morning rituals. I get up and make coffee. While the coffee’s brewing I turn on the TV set to watch Today. To keep myself happy, that’s all the news I watch. If the Philippines makes it there, and it does sometimes, then that’s the real news. Anyway the Today show is not all news. It’s a magazine format that I like and enjoy. It’s great while I’m getting dressed. Or it was until it disappeared.
But one day I was fiddling with the remote of my TV set when I stumbled onto channel 16 called Talk TV. There was my Today show except now it’s at night and in the morning you get the Nightly News, then the Hollywood The Insider and finally a new talk show called The Talk. This is my new favorite. It is a talk show of five ladies. The main moderator is Julie Cheng, Chinese-American, candid, anchor of the American Big Brother. Next to her sits Holly Robinson Peete, whose skin is like coffee with milk, or cafe-au-lait, as the French would say. She has an autistic son they featured in a series they did on autism. Next is Sharon Osbourne, the oldest, and my favorite among the hosts. She is the wife of Ozzy Osbourne and is also one of the judges on America’s Got Talent. She is very witty and off-the-wall. Next to her sits Sara Gilbert, whom I used to see as one of the daughters on the TV series Roseanne. Sarah is a lesbian and she expresses the point-of-view of her gender, which doesn’t differ that much from the others. Finally there’s Leah Remini, who used to play the wife in King of Queens, who’s American-Italian and presents her own point-of-view. They are just five ordinary women, each representing a target segment, each voicing their own opinions, sometimes they will have arguments, which Julie or somebody else will quiet down when it gets rowdy, but always it is fun. That’s what I like about this show, it’s always fun.
There’s the other show The View, I think it’s called, with women like Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg. That show I could not get myself to watch regularly. When you’re a Filipina watching, it gets boring. But The Talk makes you realize that women are the same all over the world. They have the same sense of humor. Discussing their different points-of-view gives the audience a wider view of the issues, hearing different opinions and choosing for herself which one she agrees with. That’s the way I see it anyway.
I always agree with Sharon Osbourne, who is English and outrageous. Lately they were discussing the second Lorena Bobbit case in the USA but it’s a woman with a different, difficult name. Anyway this woman cut off her husband’s organ and (learning from Lorena who threw it out of her car window thus her husband could retrieve it and a surgeon sew it back) threw it down her garbage disposal unit. In the USA every sink comes with a garbage disposal unit, which liquifies whatever you throw down it and you turn on the running water. Now let’s see if there’s a doctor who can sew a liquified thing back on!
Well, that was a funny show. Sharon Osbourne completely defended the woman, feeling she was right to do what she did. Did she tell the woman to do it? No, the woman already did it. The Talk was just commenting. Could they have prevented it from happening? No, they did not control the woman. As I remember it the discussion brought laughter to the five women so when I watched it on Wednesday morning and saw the women apologizing for the irreverence they showed genital mutilation, I was upset. What happened to you? I wanted to ask. Did some activist accuse you of supporting genital mutilation and the network decided they did not want to offend activists so they asked you to apologize? Or did some male network executive decide to ask you to apologize to the public because you threatened male crotches? All you did was approve of the gesture a wife accorded her husband after she found out he had been horrendously unfaithful to her. What was wrong with that? You did not tell all women to cut off their husband’s if they discovered him to be unfaithful. That takes either extraordinary rage or extraordinary bravery but that one woman had both and did it then liquified it, I think that deserves applause. Don’t listen to the few males who sent their opinions. Anybody who objects, read his opinion on air but don’t apologize for your behavior. You did no wrong.
I think we give in too much to people who humorlessly protest. Sharon Osbourne was obviously asked to apologize. She couldn’t do it initially. So Leah picked up for her and apologized for the whole group but you could tell nobody was happy about it. This they must remember — that show will succeed because it makes people laugh. If they stop doing that, they may become as boring as The View. And if men want to object then they should set up their own male talk show and call it The Grunt because they don’t talk that much anyway.
Why don’t I watch local TV? One straight answer, not my speed. Local TV is far too slow and witless for me.
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