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By Marc Peyser
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It's one of the oldest story lines in the talk-show handbook: guests reveal their crushes on unsuspecting acquaintances. Last week, however, ""The Jenny Jones Show'' threw in a ratings-grabbing twist. The secret admirers were men -- and so were the objects of their affections. But Jonathan Schmitz says no one told him about that crucial detail. Schmitz, a 24-year-old waiter and avowed heterosexual, was reportedly ""stunned'' when he walked onto the ""Jenny'' set in Chicago and discovered that his admirer was Scott Amedure, 32, a neighbor from Orion Township, Mich. Though he sat patiently through the hour long show, Schmitz later said the show had ""eaten away'' at him. Three days after the taping, he found an unsigned, sexually suggestive note at his door. Schmitz allegedly snapped. Police say he bought a 12-gauge shotgun, went to Amedure's house and shot his now unsecret admirer -- killing him with two blasts. Then he turned himself in. (Schmitz later pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder.)
The ""Jenny'' killing renews questions that have dogged daytime talk shows since the ""Geraldo'' broken-nose episode of 1988. With one guest now dead and another charged with murder, have these programs, which reach up to 50 million viewers a week, gone too far? Will Montel, Ricki and their 20 clawing rivals finally clean up their acts? At least one talk-show producer acknowledges that an ugly threshold has been crossed. ""As an industry, we have become irresponsible,'' says David Sittenfeld, executive producer of the ""The Richard Bey Show.'' ""The only thing that hasn't happened is someone being killed on the air.''
The ""Jenny'' producers deny they're responsible for Amedure's death (though they won't air the offending episode). Jenny Jones told Newsweek she is ""extremely upset and very much concerned for the family of the deceased.'' In the trade,the toothy, honey-voiced Jones is considered a five-star general when it comesto the ""ambush'' -- where hosts surprise guests with embarrassing revelations. The show's distributor, however, insists Schmitz had been ""fully briefed'' that his ""secret admirer could be a man or a woman.'' Says Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions: ""No one was lied to, no one was misled.''
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But the producers knew that none of the secret admirers ""could be'' a woman, since all the guests were men. They also contradict Schmitz's statement to police. ""Our evidence shows that he was not aware [of the gay angle] until he got onstage with the cameras running,'' says Oakland County, Mich., prosecutor Richard Thompson. ""Jenny Jones's producer's cynical pursuit of ratings and total insensitivity to what could occur here left one person dead and Mr. Schmitz now facing life in prison.''
Even if producers misled Schmitz, they did not commit a crime. But did they have a moral obligation to make their intentions completely clear? Talk-show host Jerry Springer says producers should tell guests ""here are the full range of possibilities. Are you OK with this?'' before an episode of nasty surprises. Yet he's not sure that discovering a gay person is attracted to a straight guest constitutes -- on these shows, in 1995 -- a nasty surprise. Talk-show critics, however, argue that any ambush is out of bounds. ""People are being exploited for the sake of ratings,'' says Ricardo Amor, a lawyer who won an undisclosed settlement last year from ""The Montel Williams Show'' for a woman who said she was invited on a show about ""old boyfriends'' only to find her sister revealing that she had slept with the woman's current boyfriend of 14 years.
Will the talk shows finally reform themselves? The prospect already seems unlikely. The day after the slaying, a public-relations executive in Chicago says she got a call from the Montel Williams staff. They want a psychologist to discuss the ""Jenny'' murder on an upcoming show.
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