Salon.com > Daytime television

The end of the rainbow for Dr. Oz?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:04:00 +0000

When you're a famous doctor with a daily TV show, you've got to be careful about the claims you make. You've got to tread the line between giving entertaining sound bites for daytime viewers and knowing how to avoid giving any advice that could get you in hot water. So it was perhaps inevitable that cardiac surgeon, People Magazine Sexiest Man and television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz would find himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from an unhappy viewer. What's surprising about it is the cause.

Earlier this week, 76-year-old Frank Dietl filed suit in Manhattan's Supreme Court, saying he'd received third-degree burns on his feet after sleeping with heated rice-filled socks as Oz recommended in a show last year. Dietl says he has neuropathy, which diminishes sensation in his feet and made him unable to realize he was being burned. The show's spokesman, meanwhile, issued a statement that it stands by "the content in our program as safe and educational for our viewers." Ah, good old educational Oz.

I sold my soul to Ricki Lake

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

My fiancée and I sat next to each other on the set of "The New Ricki Lake Show," about to come back from break. My heart slammed in my chest as hard as George Forman at the Rumble in the Jungle. I’d finally gotten myself on national television. Now I couldn’t wait to get myself off.

It all began nearly a year earlier when an essay of mine, adapted from my unpublished memoir, appeared on Salon. The essay starts off with me, my ex-wife and several gay men standing next to a Jacuzzi on Fire Island watching a straight couple we’d been having public sex with have public sex with each other. The story progresses, or degenerates, as my ex and I smoke crystal meth from a glass pipe in the company of two gay porn stars. It’s a story of the high life — fast living with a partner whose motto was “more is more.” Things end with me pulling myself out of an emotional death spiral by leaving everything about that life behind — including my wife.

Get off Kate Middleton’s back, Katie Couric

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:50:00 +0000

Because apparently this bears restating on a daily basis, here's your Wednesday reminder. Don't snark on women's bodies. Don't judge them based on their weight. If a member of the female sex does not conform to your ideal image of what her size should be, you know what? Keep it to yourself, concern troll. This one is going out to you, Katie Couric.

Couric's syndicated talk show doesn't debut until next week, but she is already wading into controversial subject matters – albeit unintentionally. A Tuesday profile in USA Today -- a story, by the way, in which writer Gary Levin referred to the 55-year-old Emmy- and Murrow-award-winning former "Today" and CBS Evening News anchor as both a "girl" and "gal" -- mentioned Couric's response to a test audience member's question about a dream guest. Kate Middleton, she declared, before adding, "I think she's getting too thin."