confessional television

She is indeed the leading practitioner of confessional television.

Surely we hear enough about derelicts from confessional television, magazines and books.

How does her confessional television differ from Phil Donahue's and Springer's?

Bill Clinton's confessional television appearance in the summer of 1998 plays on television, and later the unmistakable voice of Kenneth Starr issues from a car radio.

Meanwhile he was conducting a personal life that became an ongoing tabloid saga complete with confessional television interviews and smutty tape recordings of stunningly graceless sexual small talk.

But true to the age of confessional television and tell-all biographies, drawing people into the sometimes unsavory details of a personal civil war is what this book is all about.

"Now that I got a daughter I would work real hard," he said, sounding like the people on confessional television shows, which does not mean he did not mean what he said.

The question came by way of an e-mail message to Oprah, the queen of confessional television, and Gov. George W. Bush took it head on: What is the public's biggest misconception of him?

Mr. Granger's "Talk Opera" skewers grand opera, confessional television, pop psychology and political correctness in a series of deft strokes that would do a master parodist like Peter Schickele proud.

In the early days of American confessional television with hosts like Oprah and Jerry Springer, Britons were aghast at Americans' seeming eagerness to spill their darkest secrets on television; now they are doing it themselves, in a different format.

Audiences love staged fright, which is in a class by itself, in contrast to confessional television shows, movies about serial killers and others that repulse with gratuitous violence ("The General's Daughter"), not to mention the rampant, random barbarity of a benumbed culture.