Laura Grindstaff. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 318 pp., 12 b/w ills. $20 paper.

A computer game called Talk Show Riot 1.1 illustrates the degree to which daytime talk-show guests are perceived in mainstream culture as both extreme and cliched. Approximately five megabytes of downloadable freeware, Talk Show Riot features talk-show guests as the action game's fighters in a quest to become "the biggest draw in daytime TV." As gaming Web sites describe it: "In your riot, you will use fists, beer bottles, chairs, baseball bats, and more as you destroy the competition. Guests include the fat lady, the pimp, the out-of-control teen, the drag queen, and even a member of the KKK." Suffice it to say the stock character options manage to sum up what many of us assume about the substance of talk shows.

Denounced by the mainstream media and even by the producers of talk shows themselves as "trashy," talk-show guests are frequently economically and culturally marginalized women and minorities--postindustrial, pink-collar workers who are further marginalized in the general culture by participating in talk-show segments such as "My Mother Prostitutes Me," "Wives Confront Cheating Husbands," "My Daughter's Out of Control!" "Pet-Custody Battles," and "Forbidden Relationships." By performing the personal in public, talk-show guests transgress the boundaries of behavior and decorum deemed appropriate by middle-class society. Talk-show guests are guilty of airing their dirty laundry in public.

In The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows, sociologist Laura Grindstaff does not dispel these stereotypes about talk-show guests so much as complicate them. The Money Shot is a behind-the-scenes look at the production and consumption of social inequality as a form of entertainment. Grindstaff spent over a year as an intern on two different talk shows that define either end of the spectrum of "classy" and "trashy" options for daytime talk-show viewing. For the book, she interviewed producers, guests, and audiences. The result is an analysis of what is at stake in the production of the talk-show guest as a cultural image of the working class as "trash."

The title of The Money Shot is borrowed from porn films and refers to the raison d'etre of daytime talk shows--the emotional out-burst or confrontational climax of the show. Grindstaff uses porn terminology not in order to denounce talk shows but to demonstrate the reasons for the disparagement of both pornography and talk shows in the general culture. In hard-core porn films, the money shot is the moment of male ejaculation that, contrary to the requirements of procreation, is usually deployed on his partner's body or face for maximum visibility. As such, the money shot provides visible evidence of sexual pleasure and functions as proof that they're really doing it and not merely faking it. More important, the money shot is the visible moment wherein the body escapes volition, wherein the "privates" take over and are in excess of the otherwise public norms of bodily and emotional restraint.

Indeed, the distinction between private and public, body and intellect is, according to Grindstaff, what is at stake both in television talk shows and in critics' objections to them. In this genre, the money shot refers to bodily fluids other than ejaculate: namely, the tears that stream or drip down the face; the suffused blood visible in an angry face; the spittle sprayed from a mouth contorted by rage, spewing bleeped invectives; even the fistfights, bared breasts, and spit-swaps on stage. Talk shows, as Grindstaff puts it, "are more about talking bodies than about talking heads" (190-91). But bodily fluids on talk shows not only expose the body out of control, they also evince its class status: whereas the middle-class "manages" emotion, keeping personal emotions private, the performance of emotion in the public sphere is construed as a lower-class phenomenon on which talk shows capitalize. Thus, Grindstaff argues, criticism of talk shows is itself inevitably class-based: "Middle-class disgust with daytime talk shows helps reproduce [class] hierarchy when it confuses the characterization of talk shows as overly emotional and excessive with a negative, moral evaluation of those characteristics" (267).

What constitutes the money shot differs, however, between self-proclaimed classy shows like Oprah, which appeal to a largely white, female, middle-class demographic, and trashy shows like Jerry Springer or Rikki Lake that consciously go for the "down and dirty" sleaze and appeal to a broader audience mix of gender and race. Whereas Oprah goes for tears--a soft-core, "feminine" money shot--Jerry Springer goes for fistfights; and whereas Oprah Winfrey is lauded for her sensitivity, Jerry Springer is condemned in the media even as the on-air accolade, "Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry!" is chanted by audiences when a fight breaks out on stage. Talk-show guests interviewed by Grindstaff often distinguished between shows, asserting that they would rather air their issues on a classy show than a trashy one, or expressing shock when their appearance even on a classy show resulted in a betrayal of dignity.