News You Can Bruise for 2003 March 2 (entry 2)
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Dead Spammer #3 >
Sun Mar 02 2003 22:21: I think there's an untapped market for a talk show that features people who are neurotic or freakish, but not really neurotic or freakish enough to be featured on existing talk shows. This show would capture viewers who feel guilt or shame when watching existing talk shows. My proposed show would feature such minor deviants as:
People who make jokes that seem a little over the line, "the line" being defined by context and the makeup of the joke audience.
People who still live with their parents, but they're trying to get jobs and they're still in their mid-twenties so it's not incredibly pathetic or anything.
People who cultivate little everyday superstitions, and try to perform them in unobtrusive ways so that people don't notice and ask them why they always eat their food in alphabetical order.
Women Who Love A Little Bit Too Much, And The Men Who Love Them, But Not Quite Enough.
The audience members from any other given talk show.
Eventually the talk show would become desperate for ratings and go all sensationalist, but when it did it would only be as bad as a regular talk show is now.
The other thing I think talk shows could do is form a Talk Show Wrestling Federation like the WWE, have talk show hosts bad-mouth each other and every once in a while get into a ring and hit each other with folding chairs. They could orchestrate rivalries and make up story arcs about how host X had stolen host Y's guest, or whatever. I don't know whether this would help ratings, but I figure it's a good test case for this alleged superpower of mine, where I can trick arbitrary people into hitting each other with folding chairs.
Filed under: television