On Memorial day, I had the "pleasure" of watching the three-hour special ABC News docuseries "Dirty Talk: When Daytime Talk Shows Ruled TV," (no doubt available on YouTube). It explores the rise, fall, and lasting cultural impact of the sensational, conflict-driven daytime talk shows of the 1980s and 1990s, featuring interviews with iconic hosts like Maury Povich, Ricki Lake, and Steve Wilkos and featuring clips from Jerry Springer and a number of his competitors.

These shows kept their position in the TV domain because they garnered an amazing amount of advertising revenue based on their massive viewership.

As their reign began to trail off, reality shows provided Americans with their quota of pain and chaos - whether it was Fear Factor, the Wives of the Jersey Shore or Trump firing people, the theme was the same. As daytime TV withered and YouTube, Tik Tok et al picked up the slack, some politicians, familiar with our dependence on watching pain and chaos are simply replicating "shows" of this pattern on a national political basis.

Simply tune-in next week to see if we are bombing Iran, sending immigrants to the Congo, exposing UFO's or dozens of other parallel subplots, as the US population continues to find chaos and pain exciting and entertaining.

Jeff