Open Journal Montreal

By Jeny Nussey.

What is so special about Dr. Phil?

“Get real. Get smart. Get going.” These are the no-nonsense sentiments adorning the top of Dr. Phil McGraw’s Web page, accompanied by an unsmiling image of the mostly bald Texan. This slogan epitomizes the tell-it-like-it-is formula that characterizes Dr. Phil’s self-help books and T.V. talk show. The popular doctor—who does actually have a PhD in psychology—has had an interesting career path. After a distinguished career in high school football, Phil McGraw decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and study psychology. Phil went on to become a doctor. In fact, he began his career as a therapist in practice with his father. After some years, he decided that he disliked sitting and listening to people’s problems for months on end. So Dr. Phil joined forces with a colleague and created Courtroom Sciences Inc. (CSI), a consulting firm which holds mock trials and does trial preparation for corporations.

It is through CSI, that Dr. Phil met Oprah. She was so impressed with his straight-talking style, that after she successfully made her own courtroom defense, she introduced the doctor on her show. For four years he appeared every Tuesday, boosting Oprah’s ratings by a remarkable 24% (Peyser, 2002). He also writes self-help books, publishes companion workbooks and has a column in O, The Oprah Magazine. In the fall of 2002, Dr. Phil finally decided to take the next logical step in his own story and made a go of it on his own daytime television talk show. The Dr. Phil Show—a branch of the Oprah Winfrey empire, co-produced by Oprah herself—was a long shot because it is not your average talk show. It is a show about confessing, but it is also primarily a show about giving and getting advice. Plus, its host is a blunt Texan who likes to talk.

Building on the 4 years of popular guest spots he had on Oprah, Dr. Phil has effectively succeeded as a solo act. In its second season, his show still enjoys some of the highest ratings on daytime television. He advises guests with all kinds of problems: marital, financial, physical, racial, interpersonal, and so on.

The mediated distribution of advice has existed in various forms of media for some time (for example, I am thinking of well-known figures such as Ann Landers). Especially in the case of medical and professional advice throughout history, and not just in the modern media, there is a tradition of men advising women (some of which is nicely documented by Ehrenreich and English in For Her Own Good). Similar things may be said about mediated confessions and therapeutic discourse (see White, 1992). In print, radio, and television, getting advice, giving advice and offering mediated therapy have occupied their fair share of the market. In the realm of daytime talk shows in the last decade or so, it seems that the confessional format has dominated. Take for example the shows hosted by Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo and most recently, Oprah. These shows consist of a host who introduces and questions guests, eliciting and shaping their stories (see White 1992, and Alcoff & Gray, 1992). Then, the host might appeal to the studio audience to address their own questions or comments to guests.

Talk show guests tell their stories as they are prompted by a host, while audiences react (this reaction can be public, televised, or just hurled at the TV by a lone viewer in her or his living room). Guests on these shows are often chosen to create the greatest spectacle possible, although the type of spectacle varies somewhat from show to show. Dr. Phil departs from the standard talk show format in that he doesn’t showcase self-proclaimed deviants, extremists, or other celebrities. Dr. Phil’s guests tend to be middle class and often tell their stories in the context of family. The spectacle and entertainment value come from the guests often tearful confessions. More importantly, they come from Phil’s comments (frequently sarcastic) and advice to his guests. This usually consists of a no-nonsense assessment of the situation—and Phil doesn’t hesitate to be harsh—with what needs to be done to improve it. And all advice is delivered in simple down-home Texan lingo.

So, as a sometime user of self-help myself and as a semi-responsible observer of self-help culture, before I knew much about the doctor’s background, I decided to give Dr. Phil a chance. I have several friends who are also graduate students who have admitted to me that Dr. Phil is their guilty secret. Thus, I was curious to see the show myself to find out why so many people dig the doctor. Plus, as I have started writing about Dr. Phil, more and more people I know are turning out to be Dr. Phil fans. But to begin with, in spite of the endorsements I got from a few friends—or maybe because of them—I sat down to watch Dr. Phil already disliking him and his show.

Why should I dislike Dr. Phil?

What could I have against Dr. Phil? I must begin with my own personal foibles. On principle, I don’t like strangers, or really anyone, telling me what to do. Thus I find it disturbing that so many people are willing to look for guidance from a tall white Texan who decided he wants to give people simple, practical, brutally honest advice on broad cast T.V.—even if he does have a PhD. Who is he to tell me what to do? Why should I respect his authority? More importantly, why should I want to watch people expose their personal problems on network T.V.? Aren’t they just being exploited to get good ratings? And isn’t the good doctor just trying to sell his latest book anyway? This kind of television appeals to me the least because it is so blatantly sensational and shameless in its exploitation of human emotions for the purposes of marketing and profit. In short, Dr. Phil wields a power that I find frightening, and I did not trust him to wield it responsibly.

There is nothing radical about Dr. Phil’s show. He tends to invite guests who are firmly middle class, often white—though not always—and who fit the normative U.S. conception of the family (wife, husband and child or children) inhabiting the normal roles this implies. As a genre, and Dr. Phil is no exception, the talk show is accused of sensationalizing people’s problems for the sake of entertainment while marking certain behaviours as normal and others as socially unacceptable. Although talk shows often discuss issues that are taboo, their doing so usually just reinforces existing social norms and expectations surrounding these issues (see Tolson 2001, Tavener, 2000, Peck 1995). The Dr. Phil Show’s content is conservative, excluding alternative conceptions of the family. And this is only part of the myriad ideological implications of the choices that shape the show. I should also point out that Dr. Phil is very much a self-help guru, in that he points to ways in which the individual is responsible for change in her or his life without acknowledging the possibility that larger social and cultural structures also contribute to people’s personal problems. For the self-help guru, the personal has little to do with the political. In spite of these criticisms, now that I have watched the show I confess that I just can’t hate Dr. Phil as I want to.

Please make no mistake: I’m still not a huge Phil fan. So how could the doctor garner the goodwill of a skeptic like me? To find some answers to this question, in this paper I would like to discuss some of the tensions in the Dr. Phil talk show and how these tensions play out, compelling me as a sometime viewer, to enjoy watching. My discussion will be structured around three axes; the play between speaker and listener positions, between exploitation and therapy, and between theory and experience. How does he navigate these tensions while keeping my interest and convincing me that he might actually do some good?

The moments of potential conflict that I will identify are particular to a show that relies on guests to confess their stories to a host who is a mediator as well as a provider of ‘expert’ advice. They are also particular to a show that provides spectacle with a veneer of propriety. The reason, I will argue, that Phil McGraw and his show are appealing (or not totally repugnant, in my case) is that the show itself is guided and shaped by a master tension that is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated in an elusive but intriguing way: the host must be a tough guy and a sensitive guy at the same time. In other words, Dr. Phil is a man with many stereotypical masculine qualities who is operating in a stereotypically feminine sphere: family relations on daytime television. By playing with the tension between traditional masculine and feminine roles (intentionally or unintentionally), I will argue, Dr. Phil is simultaneously redefining and being redefined by the genre of advice-sharing daytime talk show which he hosts.

Before I continue, I would like to problematize my use of the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ In her Technologies of Gender Teresa de Lauretis iterates the theoretical perils of defining gender; “[T]hat notion of gender as sexual difference and its derivative notions—women’s culture, mothering, feminine writing, femininity, etc.—have now become a limitation, something of a liability to feminist thought” (de Lauretis, 1987: 1). While I dislike perpetuating stereotypes that reinforce norms of gender division and realize that they can only serve as guidelines because their definitions are constantly in flux, I also recognize that our Canadian and western cultures are still somehow built and re-built on these assumptions. Said assumptions are built on sexual difference, but extend so far into the realm of culture, that I feel that they are useful here, so long as they overtly addressed as stereotypes. It is presumptuous of me to assume that my own rules of masculine and
feminine behaviour are the same as everyone else’s, but it is through my own stereotypes that I understand the show. I hope that my own cultural radar is not so weak as to be out of sync with some these collective cultural schemas. Indeed, it is in Dr. Phil’s play with these stereotypes that I sense hints of a breakdown. Not one that I will ever see happen on the show, but hints are enough to keep me interested.

What’s not to hate?

Dr. Phil’s talk show exists where confessional discourse, self-help culture, and therapeutic discourse all intersect. This in itself is unique on daytime television. Thus, to ground my understanding of the show, I will appeal to the work of Mimi White on confessional discourse in television, along with Wendy Simonds’ work on women and self-help reading, and Alcoff and Gray’s work on the talk show confessional. Indeed, to begin my discussion, I will clarify my use of the term ‘tension,’ Borrowing from Wendy Simonds’ Women and Self-Help Culture:

The atmosphere on ‘Late Night’ shares with ‘Donahue’ a reliance on tension. The test on ‘Late Night’ is for guests to receive laughter and not to let Dave get away with too many jokes at their expense; the test on ‘Donahue’ is to gain the support and avoid the wrath of the audience (Simonds, 1992: 221-221).

The test on Dr. Phil’s show, I would argue, is to entertain the audience with his sharp tongue without alienating them and his guests. These tensions are tug-of-wars between host and audience, over contradictory events or ideas. The key idea is that these are recurring conflicts where keeping track of winners or losers may not be important. What is most interesting for the purposes of this paper is the nature of the conflict that is being played out.

This brings me to the first area of tension I would like to explore, which involves the notion of performance as it applies to speaking and listening. As this is a daytime television talk show, everyone is performing for the cameras; the guests who tell their stories and whose stories are told, Dr. Phil who listens, facilitates and gives advice, and the studio audiences who listen and react. Everyone has roles to fill. People alternate between being speakers or listeners—the control of speaking being typically masculine and listening being feminine—and more often than not, the host is in control of this play. However,

In this context the inclusion—even the promotion—of transgressive speech serves as a strategy of containment, confining it within the networks of confessional discourse and consumerism at the centre of these programs. But the production of meaning and of subjectivity is constantly renegotiated, a process exacerbated by the daily renarrativization of these shows. The very strategies of discourse that work to secure and regulate subjectivity are the very means for expressing and recognizing social transgression (White, 1992: 81).

As Mimi White suggests, at different times all of these people are implicated as subjects of the talk show. And not all kinds of speech are acceptable. But the individual who gets by far the biggest share of camera time and whose voice overpowers the rest is still the host, Dr. Phil. His direction of the play between who speaks and who observes is indicative of the ‘tough guy/sensitive guy’ tension. He must allow guests to speak, and allow himself to listen without letting their speech get out of his control—a difficult and sometimes impossible task.

In 1993, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray wrote the essay “Survivor Discourses: Transgression or
Recuperation,” where they look at how confessional discourse on talk shows shapes the stories told by women about their experiences of being raped. Dr. Phil rarely treats a topic so volatile as rape, but what Alcoff and Gray say about marketing and the way survivors’ stories are contained by hosts on talk shows applies as well to dissatisfied wives and overweight teenagers. Alcoff and Gray sum up control the talk show spectacle nicely when they write:

Uncontainable emotional outbursts may threaten to disrupt the smooth flow of patriarchal commerce. When survivors’ emotional displays are carefully packaged into media commodities to boost rating or sell magazines, their impact has been used to serve the means of commodity capital (Alcoff and Gray, 1993: 286).

Dr. Phil’s controlling voice thus contains his guests’, and does indeed seem to be carefully
packaged.

Both Phil’s language and his physical appearance are key to his ability to appear in control of tensions between speaker and listener. And his performance includes a myriad of tasks. He must elicit interesting, entertaining confessions from his guests while keeping them in line with time limits, limits of propriety and listening to their stories. Perhaps his most consummate performances are in his advice-giving to guests, where he frequently treads the line between stereotypical masculine tell-it-like-it-is harshness and feminine sympathetic understanding.

For example, at one point in an episode entitled “Divided by Race,” Dr. Phil interviews an elderly gentleman, a once-beloved uncle, who has excommunicated his niece because she is married to a Mexican man. Dr. Phil questions the uncle about his interactions with his niece and the rest of the family. Then he questions the uncle’s opinions about race. He finishes with a point blank accusation that the uncle is “a racist,” and the two yell back and forth for a minute. Abruptly (as is characteristic of talk shows where the host has to maintain some propriety as well as keep to a tight time schedule) Dr. Phil turns to the niece and gives her his consoling advice in view of the fact that her uncle’s mind will not be changed. Here Phil changes from confrontational to consoling in a split second. His tone changes from yelling and forceful to lulling, smooth and empathetic. In his shouting match, he is the typical masculine stereotype, in a contest where the loudest wins. Now, in this clip could Phil be trying to open dialogue about race, to question cultural assumptions, or is he just trying to make good daytime T.V.? I would argue that he has at least partially succeeded because I cannot give a definitive answer to this question. In his good cop/bad cop act, he plays both the angles.

In her book Tele-Advising, Mimi White argues that therapeutic discourse permeates all television, not just advice shows. In her discussion of prime time fictional shows, she discusses slippages between the roles of therapist and patient: “The slippages in identification within the therapeutic problematic disrupt the possibility of fixing individuals with specific positions of power within the therapeutic dynamic once and for all, while it sustains the established positions and terms of the discourse of therapy” (White, 1992: 169). Dr. Phil is in an interesting position, precisely because the unique format of his show, and its place in the culture. It is possible for him to capitalize on this flexibility. He can choose between being the masculine talk show host, the fatherly therapist, or on rarer occasions the empathetic feminine listener and observer. If, indeed, therapeutic discourse is so ubiquitous, its familiarity allows the advice show to take liberties that might otherwise be taboo—such as playing with the gendered roles related to knowledge of relationships and the modes of dispensing advice.

In the show entitled “Confidence Course,” a guest who is too shy to approach women in bars sits on the stage in special low chairs1 while a slide neatly listing all of this man’s negative thoughts—just confessed to Dr. Phil and his audience—is projected large on the wall behind them. This is a concrete modeling of the way in which any viewer with a similar problem can sit down and try to articulate and list their own negative thoughts, in order to solve their own particular problems. This is also effective in terms of reinforcing the guests’ confessions: “Yes, Bob is a 32-year-old virgin who still believes he looks fat even though he lost those 200 lbs.” As a viewer, I have a better idea of how the guest/patient feels but I am also absorbing ways to cope with my own problems. And if I really like the doctor’s ideas I can go out to my local bookstore and buy one of his workbooks, which are surely full of more similarly helpful exercises. As a result, I am allowed to feel empathy and to judge at the same time. I am both the therapist and the patient. Plus, it has the added bonus of showing that Dr. Phil can listen (somebody had to make that slide, and Phil often uses interview techniques where he repeats guests’ statements back to them in question form).

Dr. Phil’s performance as a normal man is key in order for this sell to work. He serves as the measure for guests and for viewers. This normalcy is not overtly declared, but implied in his dress, personal history and expert credentials. At times Phil needs to be able to serve as the stick by which his guests’ normalcy or sanity is measured. Wendy Simonds observes:

Such shows [like Oprah and Donahue] work well as advertisements for self-help books, not only by featuring ‘experts’ who write self-help books, but by creating and atmosphere where oddity can be celebrated and booed, where normalcy can be contested and affirmed (Simonds, 1992: 220).

Dr. Phil very successfully creates a space where we see normal and abnormal defined by him. Because his style is unique and self-professedly straightforward, he distills what seem like complicated family and personal problems into bits of simple advice. Phil serves as a character foil for his guests. Dr. Phil speaks normalcy and listens to oddities and aberrations.

Generally, the themes of his show are built around the family. Phil listens to stories of dysfunction and solves problems to create stronger families, all the while reinforcing normative ideas of what constitutes a healthy family. To this end, once a week or so the show features “the Dr. Phil family.” This is a family that Phil has chosen to work with over a long period of time. He puts cameras in their house and asks them to keep video diaries which are then edited and aired. Outside these episodes, Dr. Phil normally has three segments to his show, treating three different people with problems that are thematically linked. So formulaically, much of Phil’s general format, the structure, and marketing of his show are similar to Oprah. In terms of content, the doctor steps away from Oprah’s emotional feelgood style, which is partly why observers were worried that his show might not succeed (Peyser, 2002). In a way, his good cop (listener) and bad cop (overbearing speaker) are mirrored in his relationship to Oprah, implying again that his show must consciously cultivate an interplay of feminine and masculine roles.

The second push and pull of tensions that intrigues me involves the persona that Dr. Phil cultivates, somewhere in between the Jerry Springer-esque exploiting entertainer and the empathetic therapist. For example, I expected a tall, white man—an ex- high school quarterback—to be a voice of typical U.S. right wing conservatism and possibly a voice of extreme racial prejudice (for some reason, Texans are the victims of this stereotype to the point that even I have absorbed it). His physical appearance and background don’t jive with my idea of the open-minded, approachable, neutral therapist. And how could I stand him otherwise? I have to ask myself how much his loyalties lie with the status quo and his personal agenda, and how much they lie with more altruistic goals.

While he is conservative in many ways, he surprises me now and then by throwing in, here and there, a liberal opinion. Phil McGraw is both a hardass and a sensitive guy. Take for example again the interview in the “Divided by Race” show described above. He takes sides with an interracial couple and advises them, not without apology, to move ahead and find other sources of love and support (such as the uncle’s sister, who is with them on the show, sitting in the audience). Just when I’m ready to dismiss his authority because he has done something particularly white, or male, or Texan, or when I expect he is about to give advice that is ideologically in line with the stereotype of this identity, he throws in some really sensible, practical advice. It just sounds like the best basic advice that anybody could give anybody. The show certainly reinforces conservative ideas of the family and often focusses on problems from the perspective of the normal, white, middle class family. But occasionally Dr. Phil at least comes out with a liberal or vaguely feminist rationale.

It is true that these ideas may only be trotted out when they support the larger task of keeping a nuclear family together, of making a wife and mother feel appreciated or to lighten her workload. At least at the end of the day, Dr. Phil seems to know his (studio?) audience which consists mainly of women, including his wife Robin, with whom he always walks off of the set.

Many of my impressions of Dr. Phil, the sensitive tough therapist, are also shaped by the way the show is structured and produced. I have yet to see Dr. Phil talk about a politically volatile or politically ambiguous subject. The most complex topics he addresses with his guests seem somehow universal, although he obviously deals with extreme examples. Couples with problem children, people with self-esteem problems, wives and husbands cheating on one another, families with financial problems or people fighting to lose weight, are the usual staples of The Dr. Phil Show.

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault highlights the power dynamic between speaker and listener in his definition of the confessional, and Mimi White cites this same passage in her essay on couples in advice and game shows (see White, 1992):

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciate it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile (Foucault, 1990: 61).

Dr. Phillip McGraw is in a position slightly different than the average syndicated talk show host because he is not only the de facto authority by being in control, but he brings with him a certain amount of professional psychological expertise. I propose that the Dr. Phil talk show embodies a very particular dynamic of confessional discourse on television, one where the confession is overdetermined and overshadowed by the spectacle being put on by the host.

Dr. Phil’s show does use spectacle to pull in viewer, but when he does, he always seems to be in control. In other words, his guests rarely get the better of him by bursting into tears. It seems that emotional outbursts, so long as they are contained by Dr. Phil, only add to the show’s appeal. In this way guests are being exploited. But Phil usually manages to counter-balance this by showing that he read all of the guests’ background info and by offering up a reasonable solution, or by not antagonizing people in a style so confrontational that chairs start flying.

If I, as a viewer, am going to buy Dr. Phil’s ideas as an authority, I want to believe that he pays attention to people’s problems, really listens, and is genuinely interested in helping. But I am very aware that he is using the show to promote his self-help books, companion workbooks, companion workbooks, and now a line of diet food. And I have seen the occasional show—such as the one titled “Divided by Race”—where guests have been chosen because they will clearly make a spectacle of themselves whether by crying, or by getting into a shouting match with the host.

It has struck me also, that the majority of episodes I have seen focus on pet topics which are topics on which Dr. Phil has published. For instance, the show’s current jag is “Dr. Phil’s Ultimate Weight Loss Challenge:” one for adults and one for teens. Adults follow the prescription in Phil’s book, and teens follow the advice in the companion volume written by his eldest son Jay. It is the most obvious ploy to sell books through the guests on his show—some who are succeeding in losing the weight, some who are not, and many in between—but Dr. Phil seems to make himself vulnerable, in a way, by doing this. Failures cannot make him look good, or part of me believes that. But he does not forget the people who are failing. He makes examples of them. He gives me the feeling that he also genuinely wants to see all of these people succeed, although this is the most controlled, contrived situation, and I know it is in his best interests if at least some of them do succeed (who would buy the book if it did not work for the people under Phil’s private tutelage?). Both the show itself and Dr. Phil’s particular approach to giving advice are presented in such a way as to almost make me liable to feel comfortable confessing my faults and asking for his advice.

Marketing is a many-faceted thing. Dr. Phil uses the hard sell quite often, but it is the existence of the subtler soft sells that interest me: subtler than I expected. That is to say, that although viewers know on some level that we are being marketed to, it is done in such a way that we can forget that this is what is going on (if it bothers us). And it seems to be a self-helpers tenet that it does indeed bother us. Wendy Simonds’ interpretation of women self-help readers uses of self-help culture indicates that this it indeed a contradictory aspect of the culture that, “Persistent is the feeling that therapy commercialized, robs us of sincerity” (Simonds, 1992: 222). Yet we try to buy commercialized therapy all the time. The Dr. Phil Show is no exception. Simonds continues, “Self-help teaches women marketing strategies to use on ourselves” (Simonds, 1992: 223). Where I would argue that Dr. Phil may be an exception, is that he is targeting women AND men, and that the show does do more than just sell. It helps people for real, or I can pretend that it does because it lets folk articulate emotional and interpersonal problems which are not often publicly aired. Many of the people the show follows for the “Weight Loss Challenge” are men. When couples are in trouble both wife and husband are usually on stage, and Phil makes a point of speaking to both and making both of them responsible for their relationship. At the very least, the marketing is targeting women and encouraging them to actively involve the men in their lives in the process. At times the show almost seems to challenge the feminine, therefore traditionally private, ‘nature’ of emotions without getting extremely exploitive as is the norm with such shows.

While in some ways Dr. Phil makes no efforts to sugar-coat the commercial nature of his endeavour, he must actively project the image of a concerned caregiver or counselor in order to give credence to the advice he gives. He seems to do this via the soft sell—by which I mean that as a viewer, I recognize that I am still being hailed as a consumer, but at the same time I feel as though the doctor is motivated by more than just the interest of personal capital gain. For instance, Phil seems committed to emotional and psychological pedagogy. Guests are clearly being used as examples for the rest of us viewers. Plus, Phil often mentions that he hope us viewers are listening, “’cause y’all might learn somethin’” [sic.].

This brings me to the third sphere of tension I want to study: the doctor’s therapeutic principles which employ, to my mind, a palatable populist combination of theory and experience. Dr. Phil carries off a unique marriage of experiential wisdom—stereotypically associated with feminine modes of communicating and sharing counsel (as implied in Trinh T Minh-Ha’s essay “Grandma’s Story”)—and theoretical knowledge in his doling out of advice. He vehemently eschews clinical jargon. He melds artificial and organic knowledge as they serve his purposes. This is a relatively new twist in terms of professional men advising lay-women. Yet he still trades on the fact, through examples and phrases that imply he has seen this before, that he has a PhD and he knows how to use it. This rhetorical strategy is key to this hybrid persona as ‘regular guy’ and ‘expert,” or as ‘tough guy’ and ‘sensitive guy.’

In the case of survivor discourses on talk shows, Alcoff and Gray point to the dichotomy between theory and experience: “Disclosing to another survivor works to undermine the assumption that a mediator must be neutral and objective and must derive her authority not from ‘personal experience’ but from ‘abstract knowledge’” (Alcoff and Gray, 1992: 280). Here again, I realize that telling Dr. Phil about your drama queen child is very different from voicing your experience of rape. But sometimes, I get the feeling that Dr. Phil’s advice could be the result of his personal experience. In this way, he seems like a regular fellow. His approach to the advice show and the persona he projects blur the lines between the subjective and the objective.

For most talk shows, as the viewer I tend to assume that the host is mostly neutral, is more of a mediator or
facilitator. Dr. Phil is in a unique position because part of his job is not just to shape the show through his questions and choice of themes and guests, but by offering his personal opinion, professional though it be. Part of the attraction I feel to the show is that Phil does display and array of emotion. He cracks jokes and he is
self-congratulatory, as when he goes through some particularly touchy subject with a couple then says “I hope y’all are payin’ attention, ‘cause I’m doin’ good work here!” [sic.]. These people are not asking Oprah how to improve their marriage or how to get themselves out of bankruptcy: they want Dr. Phil’s advice. Phil succeeds in combining smart, basic advice with knowledge of clinical psychology that lets him draw the line when a problem is too complex for him to treat in a 15-minute segment. He is not clinical, cold or dispassionate. Thus he at least creates the illusion that he might care about his guests, similar to the trail-blazing style of Oprah.

The doctor’s commitment to clarity is often and openly articulated. For example, in the introduction to his book Relationship Rescue, Phil writes:

If your relationship is in trouble, big trouble or small, I’m going to tell you straight up how to fix it.
I’m not going to try to be cute or glib, and I’m not going to hit you with a lot of clever buzzwords. […] I’m going to give you the straightforward, no-nonsense answers that work—answers that have always worked, but have just been buried in a deluge of pop-psych nonsense (McGraw, 2000:1).

A (mostly) down-to-earth sense of humour and dispensing practical advice (for example, he often gives his guests “homework”), convince me that Phil is not always pulling out textbook ideas, but that he is like a good parent or teacher, trying to provide practicable solutions.

Dr. Phil’s skills impress me in the pull between sincerity and salesmanship. He is a master of the soft sell and this is where he sometimes appeals to more feminine conventions of daytime television. Yet he is reputedly all about the hard sell, about overt plugs, about overt advice, and not about complicated subtleties. He manages this partly by openly denouncing some classic talk show tensions while ignoring others. Make no mistake: Dr. Phil is not exactly a maverick in terms of his style of his self-help therapy. Indeed, some argue that he is merely capitalizing on a convenient trend in psychology:

The rise of 52-year-old Phil coincides with the current popularity in Psychology circles of cognitive therapy, which, if I may brutally simplify it, identifies a problem and maps out a strategy that alters a patient’s way of thinking, achieving a specific goal as quickly and efficiently as possible. This method isn’t only a time- and money-saving favorite of our HMO era, it also lends itself to the sound-bite segmentation of an hour with commercials (Tucker, 2003:61).

On the one hand, His commitments to simplicity and to practicality are not necessarily inspired by a desire to cross gender stereotypes, but are in line with current trends in both self-help and the larger community of therapists and counselors. On the other hand, he does follow a trend in such a way as to reflect changing ideas of acceptable masculine and feminine behaviour.

Dr. Phil says that he avoids pop-psych rhetoric, but then he creates his own. “Such talk [including talk shows] fails us when it does not challenge the general faith in psychological rhetoric and reactionary political developments that encourage us to conceive of individual action as either a cure-all or the cause of all problems, and to believe we are entitled to buy the answers to our problems” (Simonds, 1992: 226). Dr. Phil’s talk purportedly succeeds on one of Simonds’ criteria, in that he recognizes that experts hide behind jargon and tries, himself, to avoid it. He uses the language of everyday experience. What he does not challenge, is the idea that the individual alone can cure all of their problems. Being a professional with a daytime television viewership, Dr. McGraw must deliver convincing advice without turning off his audience. While much of his style is very masculine, very ‘traditional talk show host,’ he does make nods to other modes of giving advice.

Why should we care?

Dr. Phil lacks subtlety in many ways. But he would be the first to acknowledge this (and has done as much in several articles including Peyser, 2002). His self-professed goal is to start people on the road to helping
themselves—not to cure them instantly. In terms of confessional television and self-help culture in general, there is a lot going on: too much for me to address here.

I do not wish to claim that Dr. Phil is pushing the limits of family and gender roles, or challenging established norms of authority. I do not wish to argue that there will ever be a breakdown of masculine and feminine stereotypes in daytime television. It is possible that Dr. Phil is just assimilating feminine, Oprah-esque qualities while reinforcing the natural feminine-ness. I still have more questions than answers. However, I can’t hate Dr. Phil, because in spite of the shameless plugs for his latest book and showers of tears shed by his guests, I believe that he genuinely wants to help people. He is a charismatic, sweet talking, public relations expert. What I respect, is that he navigates expertly many treacherous waters, and that his position on daytime T.V. demands unique things of him in terms of appealing to a contemporary audience.

Dr. Phil has managed to gain an impressive amount of popular success. As I have stated, I almost trust him myself. He manages the tension between overbearing manly expert and man speaking to intelligent, predominantly female audience in ways I did not expect. There is no denying that he is a charming personality with the proverbial ‘gift of gab’ but he is also quite clever and copes in interesting ways with potential conflicts in his self-help practice in general and on his talk show specifically. It is these creative negotiations of tension that keep me interested and keep me, at least, watching.

Works cited and Consulted

Alcoff, Linda and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourses,” in Signs. Winter 1993, pp.260-290.

Cassidy, Marsha F. “Visible Storytellers: Women narrators on 1950s daytime television,” in Style. Vol. 35 No. 2, pg.354-374, Summer 2001.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Technologies of Gender” in Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp.1-15.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An introduction. Volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Minh-Ha, Trinh-T. “Grandma’s Story,” in Woman, Native, Other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp.119-151, 1989.

Peck, Janice. “TV Talk Show as Therapeutic Discourse: The ideological labor of the televised talking
cure,” Communication Theory. Vol.5 No.1, February 1995, pp.58-81.

Simonds, Wendy. Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading Between the Lines. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Tavener, Jo. “Media, Morality and Madness: The case against sleaze TV,” Critical Studies in Media Communication. Vol.17, No.1 March 2000, pp.63-85.

Tolson, Andrew. “Talking About Talk: The academic debates” in Andrew Tolson ed. Television Talk Shows: Discourse, Performance, Spectacle. Mahwah, N.J.: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, pp.7-30, 2001.

Van Zoonen, Liesbet. Feminist Media Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994.

White, Mimi. Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Sources on Dr. Phil

Bosch, Lily. “Dr. Phil: Your total life makeover,” in Good Housekeeping. Vol. 238 No. 3, pp.118-121 and 182-185, March 2004.

Dr. Phil McGraw’s Homepage. http://www.drphil.com/

The Dr. Phil Show. “Confidence Course,” aired March 12, 2004.

The Dr. Phil Show. “Divided By Race,” aired March 15, 2004.

Duda, Karen E. “Phillip McGraw” in Current Biography. June 2002. Vol. 63 No. 6, pg.54.

McGraw, Phillip C. Relationship Rescue. New York: Hyperion, 2000.

McGraw, Phillip C. Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Peyser, Marc. “Paging Doctor Phil,” in Newsweek. Vol. 140, No. 10, p.50-?. Sep. 2, 2002. PROQUEST GENERAL REFERENCE DATABASE.

Tucker, Ken. “Triumph of Phil,” in Entertainment Weekly. No. 699, pp.60-61. May 7, 2003.

1 Normally Phil and his guests sit on higher chairs, perhaps because they are harder to throw? My guess is that Dr. Phil likes to stand and these chairs keep him from towering over his guests.

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[ originally posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 at 10:21 am and is filed under Everything. ]