The View At The Top

By James Poniewozik

Poor George Stephanopoulos is surrounded by vaginas. This April morning, four of The View's co-hosts are grilling the squirming ex-politico and ABC commentator about Donna Hanover, New York City's first lady, and her decision--later rescinded--to appear in the play The Vagina Monologues. Clearly they're enjoying his palpable male discomfort with the repetitions of the V word. "I got in trouble on Good Morning America this morning for saying that word," he pleads. "There's four of them right here!" shoots back Star Jones, as the audience--almost all female--goes nuts.

You'd think leaving the Clinton Administration would shield you from such talk. But this kind of banter, even (especially!) when there's a sex angle, is by now routine on The View (ABC, weekdays, 11 a.m. E.T.). Now in its third year, this estrogenic round table and its five outspoken hosts have made the morning safe for spicy, topical dialogue and the occasional lap dance. In a traditionally abysmal time slot for ABC, the show has seen its ratings rise 50% from a weak start; it's been imitated by other talk shows; and it scored 12 nominations, the most of any talk show, for this week's daytime Emmys (where host-producer-founder Barbara Walters will receive a lifetime achievement award).

Lunching on cold cuts after the show, the hosts, like many observers, credit The View's success to Walters' central concept: five women of disparate ages and ethnicities provocatively kicking around topics from the morning's papers. Like a team of superheroes or Spice Girls, each has her specialty, niche and demographic. There's Chinese-American reporter (and Old Navy pitchwoman) Lisa Ling, 26; African-American attorney and diva Star Jones, 38; Portuguese-American journalist and working mom Meredith Vieira, 46; Italian-American comedian Joy Behar, 54; and Barbara Walters, 68, who is Barbara Walters. As Jones puts it, View-style, "We're five women, and one is bound to piss you off."

But as important as the hosts' chemistry is their understanding of their audience. Previous morning shows were aimed at permanent housewives, offering a simulated coffee hour of chitchat in a fake living room with fake neighbors. The View recognizes that its viewers--still 72% female--include part-timers, telecommuters and maternity-leavers. Trying to get through the day without murdering the kids, they want to escape not to a surrogate home but to a surrogate office.

Enter the View crew, a band of women you'd never mistake for a family, except for the ersatz ones we encounter at work; the signature opening Hot Topics segment could be a coffee-break bull session in a white-collar office. The show defies the received wisdom that female daytime-TV viewers are interested only in innocuous chat or in Springer-style scandal shows. "You may say the show's not that smart," says co-executive producer Bill Geddie. "But for daytime, we are absolutely the Library of Congress."

Well, let's say the corner newsstand. The women's good-natured, rowdy jousting in the opening and closing round-table segments makes the show a distinctive treat. But in between is fairly typical daytime-talk fare. The celebrity interviews, which make Walters' pre-Oscars weepfests look cerebral, are generous to a fault. (And how. Vieira once gave Wesley Snipes a lap dance--"after he requested it!" she protests.) There are numerous fashion features--Jones has often shilled her line of wigs--and for every contrarian service piece on "swimsuits for real women" there's a runway show of boobulous Victoria's Secret models. And the round tables aren't exactly World News Tonight. Just like your co-workers at lunch, the hosts shoot from the lip, sometimes with suspect facts. In an Elian Gonzalez segment, Behar likened the Miami standoff to the Cuban missile crisis, where "Cuba blinked." (The Soviet Union, but who's counting?)

Last year the show added Ling after an on-air audition to replace Debbie Matenopoulos, the show's original, notoriously ditzy voice of youth. But in a way, Ling isn't the only new member of the team: Walters has opened up considerably to the show's saucy format. In a discussion of older women's sex appeal, the hosts joke about Walters' making a sex video; she closes the segment saying, "I'm off to make my film!," shimmying and starting to strip off her pink jacket. This is surely a sign of the apocalypse. But she can still be a wet blanket, especially when it comes to trashing celebrities she might want to interview later. "I still have times, and they all know it," she says, "when I'll say, 'Oh, my God, I'll never be able to talk to this person again.'" (It proves the tyranny of celebrity that the most famous interviewer on TV worries about this constantly.) Still, she's got comfortable enough so that there's talk, which she isn't commenting on, that she may give up 20/20 to concentrate on The View.

Walters knows toning down the sass would gut the show. And its freedom to offend has a substantive benefit. The flip side of the cheeky vagina talk is that the hosts haven't let delicacy keep them from doing reproductive-health segments--like "Grill Your Gyno"--with graphic illustrations. It's The View's own vagina monologue: Why should someone who has one not be allowed to say the word?

It was probably the Monica Lewinsky affair, which broke scant months after The View's launch, that confirmed the show's moment had arrived. Suddenly the country was talking about oral sex, semen and adultery in homes and offices. This talk led to hand wringing about "the coarsening of the culture," but it also illustrated the feminist dictum that the personal is political. It demonstrated--just as working women's juggling of job and home life does--that sloppy private matters can't be neatly divorced from public life. From 24-hour news to Politically Incorrect, groups of people arguing took root as the dominant mode of infotainment. The era of mouthing off was on the rise.

Thus Hanover's Vagina Monologues controversy was a perfect example of a salacious-substantive View topic, says Behar--who has just announced that she's going to appear in the play. (Hanover and husband Rudy Giuliani's travails have been very generous to the Hot Topics segment.) "It's about politics, relationships," she says. "Is she sabotaging him or supporting him? Will he turn on her? Will it hurt his campaign? It's got five or six levels."

"And we get to say vagina!" Jones and Vieira chime in. This is enough to alert den mother Walters. "Enough!" she says. "This is a TIME magazine story."

Not to worry, I tell her. TIME can print "vagina" now. It's the 21st century!

"See?" Behar says, satisfied. "They've gone downhill too."