Show has Keith Ablow psyched
It is a strangely revealing thing to hear from a psychiatrist, especially a successful one about to launch a national talk show.
In a promotional video for ``The Dr. Keith Ablow Show," the doctor provides man-on-the-street therapy. And he cheerfully confesses to one passerby, ``I only feel good if I feel like people have given me their pain."
Ablow's goal for the hourlong show, premiering Monday at 4 p.m. on WFXT ( Channel 25), is to help people touch their pain, change their lives, and provide a little revelation to the audience. But the Plum Island resident admits he's also feeding his own ``almost endless need to hear people's stories."
``When you're working as a psychiatrist what you're doing is really listening for the parts of a person's story that don't seem genuine [or] grow in an organic way from that individual's backstory," he said. ``If you hear somebody say `I had perfect parents -- and I moved out when I was 15,' you're like, `Wait a second!' That gap in meaning attracts my attention."
Of course, the very notion of another daytime talk show that probes America's personal pain is enough to make some people wince. For roughly two decades, since Oprah Winfrey took charge of the national conversation, we've been inundated with TV hosts who want to empathize their way to the top of the Nielsen ratings and turn textbook tough love into an Emmy. Dr. Phil McGraw is merely the latest (and perhaps loudest) of the bunch.
No doubt a reviewer somewhere will describe Marblehead native Ablow, 44, as a combination of Dr. Phil and Mr. Clean. His head is not actually shaved, he notes, but cut with a clipper with no attachment, a ``zero clipper." He describes it self-deprecatingly as the most honest solution to male pattern baldness. But it's also good visual branding.
``It attracted me to him," admits Hilary Estey McLoughlin , president of Telepictures Productions, which produces Ablow's show. ``It's a very iconic look he has, which helps in terms of making him interesting and very attractive to women.
``He actually showed us a picture of himself when he had some hair, and I told him if he had looked that way, I probably would have been less enthusiastic about the show," McLoughlin said with a chuckle.
On a recent Monday, Ablow was in Boston , scheduled to visit WFXT in the afternoon to promote his show. But at 8:30 a.m., he was already at the station's Beacon Hill studio, getting made up (including up top) for a live morning news interview about the John Mark Karr case, then at a fever pitch.
A forensic psychiatrist, he has testified as an expert witness, and his greatest visibility has been as a TV talking head on high-profile cases and as the author of last year's best-selling ``Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson."
It was a couple of days before the case against Karr collapsed. Ablow said that while Karr appeared to have ``a serious psychiatric illness," a role in JonBenet Ramsey's murder seemed doubtful.
Over breakfast, Ablow said a show on Karr will be the only crime story in his first two dozen episodes. Topics instead tend toward problems of everyday life, from relationships with parents and estranged family members to the dangers facing teens, such as cyber-bullying. And there's a systematic effort to provide after care, like therapy or rehab, to guests who need it.
As a psychiatrist, he said, ``You're trying to solve the mystery of people's lives. The vast majority of us live at some distance from their own truth. Why? Because we have a tendency not to want to look at the earliest chapters of our own stories."
It's the same in the courtroom, where ``you have a very skeptical jury looking at someone who has done very bad things. And the only way they're going to see that person as a human being and think about what kind of punishment is appropriate is if you give them an almost irrefutable story about the way in which that person's life made it very difficult to have free will," he said.
So how did growing up in pretty, peaceful Marblehead make Ablow chart a course to the underbelly of the human psyche?
``It convinced me that nothing about this year's sailboat design or the spectacular natural harbor is going to make people closer to their natural humanity," he said. ``In fact it can distract them from parts of their lives they need to look at that aren't pretty. And [those] are the parts that yield the greatest promise for helping us grow."
For the first time in a long conversation he looked restless, sitting forward, speaking in a slight staccato.
``I probably started facing that issue the minute I was bullied at the Glover School . I think being bullied as a kid goes on the list. Being raised Jewish in a town that still had strong feelings about Jews and blacks goes on the list. I think growing up in Clifton , a part of town that was newer and less opulent . . . goes on the list. I think my friend David Feiven , living on Countryside Lane with me, getting cancer at 13 goes on the list."
Ablow grew up, went to Brown University and Johns Hopkins Medical School. After realizing he was more interested in patients' stories than in neurosurgery, he became a psychiatrist and wrote nonfiction books about psychiatry. For years he ran a clinic in Chelsea; Chelsea seemed more like the truth than Marblehead.
The murder of a friend in 1990 led him to write ``Without Mercy," a nonfiction examination of the killer's life. Before long he had started a series of mystery-thrillers about Dr. Frank Clevenger , a Chelsea shrink who seems 50 percent Ablow and 50 percent noir archetype.
Right now Ablow's greatest challenge is logistics. He tapes as many as six shows a week in Manhattan, attending to promotion and other duties on two other days, and trying to spend weekends on Plum Island with his wife, lawyer Deborah Small, and their two young children.
He keeps a ``tiny" private practice, and he's working on a self-help book due out next May. He's renovating a small house in downtown Newburyport as his writing refuge.
Meanwhile, he's busy extracting the stories of talk show guests, with only one hour to make a difference.
``I have this thing I do, where they have to light me specially," he explained, and laughed. Then he demonstrated -- he tilted his head to one side, looking up from under his brows. Looking deep into his questioner's eyes. Demanding his story.
Then he laughed again and the moment was over. ``It's like, `Look, let's just talk about what's really going on ,' " he said.
