All Talk CL

Describing the talk show as the ``newest and least understood'' neighborhood in America, Munson, who teaches communications/media at Fitchburg State College in Mass., offers a sometimes insightful but often tedious academic survey. Munson traces the talk show's antecedents to 18th-century magazines and the 19th-century lyceum movement and describes its growth on radio and TV. The ad-libbed, news-plus-personality talk show format, he suggests, is designed to grab the attention of viewers by combining the familiar with the unpredicted. Citing Oprah , Downey and the Frank Rizzo Show , among others, Munson concludes that the talk show blurs distinctions between public and private, creating a new ``cyberspatial'' place. But he frequently diminishes the impact of his argument in prose like the following reference to a TV talk show interview of Hugh Hefner: `` Ironically, just as Playboy, in its commodified transgression, opened the middle-class home to sex, Nightbeat parasitically `exposed' that transgression for its own paratextual commodification.'' (Apr.)