Television query: Why is it on talk shows, the guest is always on screen left?
So I’m sitting at work, and my friend Geri asks me the question posed above. My initial reaction was, “Well, it’s probably because that’s the way The Tonight Show did it.” After all, I’m in the middle of reading “The Late Shift” by Bill Carter and if the first 100 pages have taught me anything, it’s that people LOVED The Tonight Show.
The problem is that answer, while logical, doesn’t seem all that legit. I mean, surely there has to be some science behind this? Why did The Tonight Show go with that look? Was it completely arbitrary?
I decided to look into the matter a little bit.
AnswerBag says that it’s a matter of stage design. Well, obviously! That’s not really much of an “answer,” AnswerBag. Thanks for nothing. They do point out the following:
But not all talk shows sits thier guests in the right side of the host. A popular show called PARKINSON has the host at the right side of the set and his guests are seated to his right. OPRAH seats her guest in the center of the stage while she sits mostly along the audience.
I don’t know about “Parkinson” but Oprah hasn’t stood amongst the crowd since the late 80s. Conclusion: AnswerBag sucks.
A better explanation was found on the Jump The Shark page for The Chris Rock Show, where a frustrated viewer said the following:
Chris Rock was funny, but too full of himself. All talk shows, with the exception of this one, have the guest sitting on the viewers left and the host sitting to the right of the screen. This is because our eyes, due to reading habits, move left to right. The person on the left side is the one you tend to look at the most. Talk show hosts, for all their faults, concede this honor to their guests. Not Chris Rock, he had such an ego, worse than even Carson or Letterman, that he sat on the left (dominant) side.
While Mr. Rock’s ego can certainly be questioned, I must say that aesthetic reasoning seemed to make the most sense. It’s a matter of where people tend to look. Possibly unrelated sidebar: when walking down the street, if someone is approaching me from the opposite direction in my walking path, I tend to, more often than not, step left instead of stepping right. This usually results in awkward exchanges.
Tags: Late Night, Personalities, Talk Shows
June 1st, 2006 at 1:15 am
The guest of honor always sits to the right side of the host if proper seating protocol is observed. In times of yore, everyone carried knives, swords, or pistolas on their right side, so only people you trusted (friends) would sit on your right side. If your enemy is over there: problem. He might grab your sword and then you can’t defend yourself. What are you going to do then, smart guy? So anyway, this is all deeply ingrained into our sense of safety. Viewers will feel safer if the host is on the right! Also, notice that the host will always have their hands on their table. Not in their lap. Same story: If they hands aren’t visible, maybe he’s getting ready to knife the guest, who knows? Again, people feel safer if they can see the hands.
I took a protocol course, and they taught all this stuff… sort of esoteric, but fun.