The Extratextuals

I went to see the filming of the Martha Stewart Show this week. A former student was an intern there, and very kindly arranged for my wife and I to go. I can’t say I’m a fan, though I’m not an anti-fan either: Martha’s often surprised me by not being the stereotype she’s purported to be. She also has a reputation for giving away freebies, and I love seeing how shows happen, so I was keen to go. More after the fold …

From start to finish, the staff do a much better job of making their audience feel wanted than do many shows with studio audiences. I’m in awe of Jon Stewart, and enjoyed Letterman, but both make you do a lot of standing and waiting. My first trip to The Daily Show was with “VIP tickets,” yet all that meant was that we got to stand inside for two hours instead of outside for an hour and a half, and inside for two hours. Letterman was heavy on the standing too. Nothing happens while you stand, either, other than continuous lectures from angry people with clipboards and headphones who think they’re Customs and Immigration Officers. They bark instructions at you, and one at The Daily Show even threatened to cancel the show, unless someone owned up to leaving trash outside (I really wanted to arrange a joint bluff-calling there: who are they kidding? Cancel the show?! Yeah, sure). You’re made to feel as though they’re doing you a massive favor by letting you in.

By contrast, Martha shows real respect to her audience. Her interns have clipboards and headphones, but they’re significantly more bubbly and cheerful (one quite amusingly informed us that today Jimmy Fallon was on, and Bill Clinton was on tomorrow, yet she showed way more enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing Fallon than this Clinton dude). Across the road was a van that offered free coffee and bread goods. And we were only in line briefly. Then we were ushered into a holding room with seats for everyone. They took our coats. They had TV playing (Martha was on, though I joked about asking them to change the channel to something more interesting). They had lots of colors and pictures of a smiling Martha. Sure, it was a little cult-like (Martha will set you free. Submit yourself to Martha), but pleasant. Instructions were offered, but without the wagging fingers and patronizing. Pictures are allowed before and after the show, whereas The Daily Show threaten you constantly not to dare try.

Then we went into the studio. These studios are always very impressive, especially if you look up. Seemingly many million dollars or more in equipment hangs above you. People bustle around with purpose, hooking things in, having important-looking conversations, and reporting back to the stage manager, who by New York City labor law must apparently wear a Yankees cap. I’ve been on sets for single-camera shows, which create a complete set, but it’s odd to see a room in which only one half is a simulation. For Martha, there’s the faux garden with the faux skyline behind it, and the warm, orange-infused kitchen on one side, and a bunch of chairs on the other.

The audience was quite remarkably homogenous. All are subtly requested to wear bright colors (“Wear what you want. Bright colors photograph especially well. Please, no white” or words to that effect), most are white women in the same age range. If I was to be nice, I’d say that everyone looked very pleasant. If I was being less nice, I’d say that a lot of prescription drug consumption was accounted for in the room. The homogeneity perhaps shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it did, since Letterman’s audience is diverse, as is Stewart’s, when I wouldn’t expect that of particularly the latter. So I came expecting a generic tourist assortment, but instead was in the layer of the New Jersey upper middle class housewife.

Martha also employs an emcee to stick around for the entire show. The “warm up guy” is common at tapings, usually a middling stand-up who gets the audience laughing and relaxed, and who tells them to yell and hoot and holler at the right moments. Warm-up guys often seem like hacks, and often are, but it’s a pretty tricky job, since they need to build up audience camaraderie and get them loose. Last time I visited Jon Stewart, he had an excellent guy, who had the audience rolling, with some biting comments directed (lovingly) at audience members. Yet they usually do their thing, then leave. Here, the guy stuck around, and worked with the stage manager to keep us laughing, and filled the commercial breaks. It had the effect of seeming more chummy, since he worked as a bridge between this big, finely-oiled production machine and the audience. I think of the stock character in British pantomimes who explains things to the audience, and breaks the fourth wall, and this was him.

And yet it’s awkward to be turned into a human clapping machine. I’m a snob when it comes to clapping. I hate when people clap a person’s entrance or exit in a show, and I feel that applause needs to be earned. Standing ovations in particular are reserved for something special. So I resent being asked to clap all the time, for anything and everything, as though I really am that impressed by ten types of pork being put into a pot. It feels like a violation of my contract as an audience member not to clap, yet that feeling in itself bothers me, since I didn’t sign anything that said I’d love and enjoy what I’m watching. This feeling never bothered me during Daily Show tapings, since I am a legitimate fan there, but here I felt awkward throughout. There was some real gender performance anxiety, too, as I was very aware of this not being the average thing for a guy in his thirties to be doing on a weekday.

Finally, when it’s all over, Martha comes out and takes some questions. These all seemed very scripted, and indeed I’m told they are. I had dreams of asking her how to craft the best prison shiv, but doubt I’d have been allowed the privilege. She came across as exactly the same, somewhat wooden, yet also warm in a curious way kind of person off-camera as on. And given that this was a “pot show” (cooking in crock pots, making pots on a pottery wheel, etc.), her opening monologue about her love of pot, and the importance of getting the right pot was actually quite brilliantly delivered, I must say. In the questions afterwards, she even snarked about Fallon’s crock pot, and showed herself to have quite the devious sense of humor. So she showed more humor and edge than I’ve seen in her before. She even noted that they hadn’t managed to fit mention of Pol Pot into the show, and maybe I’m imagining it, but I could’ve sworn that she had the beginnings of a South Park-esque comment ready to go, but instead she suppressed it and moved on.

So I saw a bit more Martha, and yet I sense that what I saw was quintessentially Martha Stewart the star, not “the real Martha” (if such a thing exists). Nick Couldry has done excellent work on people’s interactions with sets, filming locations, and so forth, and one of his interests has been in the degree to which these spaces replicate the sense of the media being a special, magic realm, even while they offer the promise of seeing the “real thing.” The Daily Show fits that analysis more – in its chaotic, grumpy, poorly planned, and shoddy set-up, it lures you in so that when you then see the brilliantly choreographed show, it amazes one all the more. But, as is perhaps to be expected, Martha has seemingly crafted everything about the experience of attending her show, from the free coffee in the line and the bubbly interns, to the questions at the end and the individual gift bags handed out as you leave. Thus, it all feels part of the production, not really a step behind it. I almost expected to learn that half the crew were actually a cast, hired to run around and look important, since it all seemed so very tightly planned, with no hint that the curtain might be removed to see anything but the show.

At the end, I walked away with four free pot scrubbers, mouth wash, and a small clay pot. And I enjoyed the show.

Uncategorized hyperreality, live audience, Martha Stewart