Word: hosting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Clearly the man is good at something. But what? That's the stumper. Hosting is perhaps the highest-profile job on TV (Oprah, Ellen, Rosie: host, host, host) and the worst defined. It's not comedy, though many comics have done it. It's not acting, though actors have--as well as Tony Danza. There are no host schools. There was no Greek muse of hosting. A host plays himself. He talks to people. Sometimes, if the job is especially tricky, he has to hold a microphone. It is a job that, theoretically, anyone can do but that talented people...
Mandel's sleazy, Luciferian Deal persona is not exactly friendly, but it befits a show about sex, greed and temptation. And it's a sign of how hosting has changed since the Beat the Clock era. Says Merv Griffin, the former talk-show host and now billionaire talk- and game-show mogul: Time was, "you hired an M.C. who every mother-in-law would love." But in the reality-TV era, talk and game shows allow, if not require, more edge. We've gone from Bill Cullen's genial cheerleading to Gordon Ramsay's four-letter culinary arias on Hell...
...thing producers agree on: it takes a lot of work and constant alertness to make hosting look like something a well-coiffed orangutan could do. By which measure Ryan Seacrest is the greatest TV personality who has ever lived. "You've got to be able to have the wind knocked out of your sails, like when Simon attacks Ryan, and bounce back," says Idol executive producer Nigel Lythgoe. Ur-host Griffin--who once hired Seacrest for a failed game show but is not a producer of Idol--gushes over Seacrest's stage-managing of the live show, whiplashing from moments...
...perfect for Idol because he so gamely embodies its glitziness and vapidity. Everything about his precision-moussed pate and cliffs-of-Dover grin screams, You are watching a show about show biz! But this is why the man can afford the finest hair gels and dentrifices: the successful host is wise enough to be the fool. There are exceptions, like the beneficent and vengeful god Oprah, but America tends to like its TV hosts risible: fussy Alex Trebek, funny-haired Donald Trump, screwball Kelly Ripa. "Being fallible works to my advantage," says Ricki Lake, who has gone from the queen...
There is, finally, a Zen paradox to hosting. You must be a celebrity and a commoner; you must be present and absent, ceding your guests the spotlight; you must know what to say and, more important, what not to. Several hosts and producers interviewed for this article repeated the importance of "getting out of the way" of the show. Seacrest says that his job is to make Idol "clever," but adds, "That doesn't mean I say something clever. I know when Simon is gearing up to say something. I can read it on his face. A host...