Talking Blues
The longer one watches Decision House, the greater one's appreciation for the genius of Jerry Springer.
Springer, unfortunately, has nothing to do with Decision House. It's the brainchild of Jay McGraw, Dr. Phil's son. An hour-long reality series, Decision House features couples in crisis. They check into a reality TV set for 48 hours of surveillance, self-assessment, and counseling from divorce lawyers, professional interrogators, and drill sergeants, with the goal of arriving at some decision about their relationship. Should they stay together? Split up? Commit double-suicide? The whole thing is presided over by the honorable Judge Lynn Toler, the reigning magistrate over at Divorce Court.
In this week's episode, the couple is ex-child star Todd Bridges and his wife of 10 years, Dori. They appear to be there not so much because their marriage is in dire trouble, but because Bridges' acting career is. According to IMDB.com, he's working steadily, with nearly 20 roles in the last three years, but he still seems to have time for any reality series opportunity that arises: he duked it out with Vanilla Ice on Celebrity Boxing, battled Leif Garrett on Fear Factor, attempted to out-double-salchow Dave Coulier on Skating with the Stars, and inevitably, cameo'd on The Surreal Life.
Based on that pedigree, is televising your adventures in marriage counseling a step up or a step down? Either way, it's not good TV. The troubled waters dividing the Bridges, it turns out, are neither deep nor all that troubled. In fact, they're not even very watery! Except for the fact that Todd can be a little controlling and Dori feels overshadowed by his celebrity status, they're on pretty solid ground.
(And, yes, the fact that Dori feels overshadowed by a guy who only rates a cameo slot on The Surreal Life is fairly remarkable. If she were married to, say, Verne Troyer, she would feel completely smothered.)
After establishing the general rift in their marriage, Todd and Dori talk about it. And then talk about it some more. Every now and then, a new variety of marriage expert shows up to advise them, and the talk continues. At least when the drill sergeant shows up, there's a twist -- the talk turns to shouting.
In the early 1990s, Jerry Springer realized that if the daytime TV talk show was ever going to emerge from the deep, drama-free abyss that Phil Donahue had driven it into, it would need a radical revision. Talk shows about non-famous people talking about their relationship woes could be interesting, he reasoned -- but only if they were cross-dressing midgets with anger management issues and no reluctance to flash their breasts in front of an audience of disapproving housewives and drunk college kids.
Suddenly, daytime TV talk shows were interesting again!
Decision House understands that it must punch up the formula somehow -- and that's why it sequesters its guests (contestants?) into a Big Brother-like compound for 48 hours and instructs them to come to some sort of life-changing decision that at least flirts with the possibility of a dramatic finale. Indeed, if some of the couples featured so far actually have chosen to get a divorce at the end of the show, that's a step in the right direction. But more crazy exhibitionists and fewer marriage experts couldn't hurt either.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]