Television Talk: A History of the TV Talk Show (Texas Film and Media Series

Book Description
"Bernard Timberg's work on talk shows reminds us all of how intimately we have been connected to this delightfully complicated form of television. It is difficult to imagine America in the twenty-first century without the talk show, and now it is difficult to imagine the talk show without Timberg's rich historical perspective." --Horace Newcomb, editor of Encyclopedia of Television Flip through the channels at any hour of the day or night, and a television talk show is almost certainly on. Whether it offers late-night entertainment with David Letterman, share-your-pain empathy with Oprah Winfrey, trash talk with Jerry Springer, or intellectual give-and-take with Bill Moyers, the talk show is one of television's most popular and enduring formats, with a history as old as the medium itself. Bernard Timberg here offers a comprehensive history of the first fifty years of television talk, replete with memorable moments from a wide range of classic talk shows, as well as many of today's most popular programs. Dividing the history into five eras, he shows how the evolution of the television talk show is connected to both broad patterns in American culture and the economic, regulatory, technological, and social history of the broadcasting industry. Robert Erler's "A Guide to Television Talk" complements the text with an extensive "who's who" listing of important people and programs in the history of television talk.


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As much a part of American culture as it is a part of this country's television programming, the talk show is the one TV genre that consistently defies convention and frequently reinvents itself. Timberg (Ctr. for Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Tech Univ.) has written the definitive explanation of the genre, offering a chronology of talk television that ranges from the late 1940s to the present. Divided into five eras that injected an important aspect into the talk show experience, the book describes what precisely has made the genre flourish throughout the years and, as a result, gives us a superb understanding of how it evolved. Timberg also spends a lot of time discussing the hosts of the most famous talk shows, from Jack Parr to Oprah Winfrey. Included are two valuable appendixes-Timberg and Robert J. Erler's "A Taxonomy of Television Talk," which covers the major talk-show classifications, and a listing of major talk shows and talk-show personalities with a brief explanation and chronology of each-and a black-and-white photo section. Practically the only in-print scholarly treatise on this subject, Television Talk is a vital addition to communications collections in academic libraries.-David M. Lisa, West Long Branch P.L., NJ Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.


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