Talk Show Is Less Talk, More Alpha-Female Action

Most television gossips are perky messengers of misfortune. As if to offset the malice of their trade, hosts like Mary Hart of “Entertainment Tonight” and Lara Spencer of “The Insider” are pageant-pretty, cheerful and unshakably sweet.Wendy Williams, a radio D.J. who last week began a four-city tryout as the host of her own daytime talk show on Fox, is a real-life scandalmonger, the kind of beauty-salon savant who wishes famous people the worst. She has a bawdy and arch side, but she can be startlingly mean-spirited. If “The Wendy Williams Show” goes national, it could mark a turning point in television etiquette. Usually it is left to standup comics like Kathy Griffin or Mario Cantone mercilessly to mock celebrities who end up in rehab or jail. Nationally syndicated talk-show hosts follow the Oprah Winfrey model and wrap their celebrity klatches in a solicitous, redemptive tone; Montel Williams, whose long running show was canceled last May, began his career as a motivational speaker. Ms. Williams made hers as a trash talker. She received a lot of attention in 2003 when Whitney Houston went haywire during a telephone interview on New York radio station WBLS — using a lot of bleeped language — after Ms. Williams asked her, insistently, about her drug and spending habits.Last Friday on the TV show, in a gossip segment she calls “Hot Topics,” Ms. Williams cited reports that Ms. Houston is taking voice lessons to repair her voice for a comeback CD and suggested that the two hold a rematch. “Let’s talk, let’s mend,” she urged. She then added flatly, “But I don’t really see vocal cords coming back, even after vocal lessons, after that amount of damage and her age.”Two young Whitney Houston fans in the studio audience rose to plead for more positivity and compassion, but Ms. Williams set them straight. SOURCE:NYT.COM