HealthMaster: Living Well with Montel
Why hadn’t anyone thought of doing this before? Infomercials have tried for decades to fool viewers into thinking they were watching something other than a paid advertisement, but none had ever before tried to make their infomercial look like a talk show by using a real talk show host—and certainly none as well-known as Montel Williams. After having his long-running daytime talk show canceled in 2008, Montel Williams returns to TV in Living Well with Montel, an infomercial for the HealthMaster blender designed to look like his old talk show. Living Well with Montel may not feature paternity testing or a drill sergeant sending an out of control teen girl to boot camp, but otherwise this hour-long infomercial (the first major infomercial that long since the old Tom Vu infomercial) closely follows the format of Montel’s old daytime show.
Viewers of Montel’s previous program will remember “Sylvia Browne Wednesday” as a regular feature…and raspy-voiced psychic Sylvia Browne makes an appearance on this infomercial for the HealthMaster as well. Indeed, the infomercial touts the reunion of the talk show host and the 71-year-old psychic “together again for the first time in more than a year” as some sort of major television event. Montel relates stories of being harassed in malls and airplanes by people eager to know the whereabouts of Sylvia Browne. Similarly, Ms. Browne says that when people approach her in public “they say to me, ‘You look naked without Montel.'” And this mere mention of Sylvia Browne naked has to count as the grossest moment on a TV infomercial since Klee Irwin played show-and-tell with a green turd. Naturally, Montel asks the psychic what she has been up to in the last year, to which she answers, “You know, the same old, same old”—which no doubt means a busy schedule of occupying booths at county fairs next to cotton candy stands and performing tricks at kids’ birthday parties after the clown has wrapped up his routine. But, as promised, the fortuneteller also makes a “huge announcement.” No, it’s not her weight; it’s that she got engaged to be married. Her fiancé probably hopes he can get free lotto numbers out of the deal.
One may wonder what aging, whiskey-voiced clairvoyant Sylvia Browne has to do with a selling a juicer/blender, but actually it makes a lot of sense: The HealthMaster is the perfect product for Sylvia to concoct her witch’s brews.
As on Montel’s earlier talk show, Sylvia Browne makes psychic predictions for members of the studio audience, using her patented soothsaying technique of pulling answers out of her ass. After a question by a woman named Megan about family illness, Montel manages to bring the discussion around to the HealthMaster juicer in one of the crassest attempts at a product plug yet:
Megan: “I just want to know: My family’s going through a lot right now with my grandma being diagnosed with cancer. My aunt has stage 4 colon cancer. I just want to know if things are going to get better for me and my family.”
Sylvia Browne (puts hand to chin like she’s deep in thought): “They get better in August.”
Montel Williams: “Stop right here for just a second. The product that I’ve been talking about throughout this hour, which is the Living Well HealthMaster blender, I’m going to tell you without a doubt you can reduce your risk of cancer, you can reduce your risk of colon cancer, if you just apply some of the principles that are in our recipes.”
Good to see the one-time colleague of Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake still knows how to show a lot of class.
Also joining Montel is a woman familiar to infomercial fans: Forbes Riley, hostess of Aromatrim, Jack LaLanne Power Juicer, and countless segments on HSN. As you would expect, Forbes helps Montel demonstrate the HealthMaster blender, but she also personally vouches for the product. In what has to be one of the most strained attempts at a before-and-after photo, Forbes Riley shows a picture of herself when she was pregnant with twins and contrasts that to her current figure. She credits the HealthMaster for her dramatic weight loss, rather than the fact that she popped out two kids.
Seated next to Sylvia Browne, Forbes touts the nutritional HealthMaster thus: “Your body’s going to be supercharged. When it works great I have to tell you it just melts away. And of course your sex life just kind of heats up”—at which point Forbes snaps her fingers and rhythmically moves her shoulders back and forth, inspiring Sylvia to shake her upper body in a simulation of some sort of “sexy” dance. Let’s be grateful this nightmare moment ended before Sylvia Browne got so hot and bothered that she felt compelled to perform lap dances for members of the audience.
Forbes then joins Montel in whipping up various “tasty sensations” using the HealthMaster. They insist that the HealthMaster is no mere a juicer, mixer, blender, or food processor: it is an emulsifier—I guess because it pulverizes food into subatomic particles. The theory behind many of their Health Master recipes is that you should “stealth” vegetables by blending them in a mixture with a lot of fruits so that you don’t know you’re having your veggies. (Kind of like how the HealthMaster infomercial is “stealthed” as an episode of Montel’s talk show.) Montel credits the health benefits of juicing for alleviating the symptoms of his multiple sclerosis, and he shows us his recipe for “Montel’s Green Fruit Smoothie,” which is mainly a lot of spinach. Although he doesn’t mention it on the infomercial, Montel Williams has admitted to taking medical marijuana for pain relief and publicly advocates its legalization. In this interview with PR.com, Montel said “But marijuana can be eaten, it can be liquefied, it can be freeze dried, it can be turned into other substances…In some cases the edible version of it is for me, and for other people I know who use it medicinally, works better then actually smoking it…Most of the time I eat it at night.” Hmmm. Perhaps the real recipe for “Montel’s Green Fruit Smoothie” contains yet another green leafy vegetable he isn’t telling us about.
Montel gets to perform more of his juicing magic for a fat family whose health is supposed to be at risk because of their blubbery bodies. Although the “entire family” is supposed to have a weight problem, nearly all the attention is on one child, Brent Jr., who is 10 years old and weighs 165 pounds. Brent storms onto the set and silently sulks in a chair with hands in pockets. One wonders why the kid has such a bad attitude: He is only being trotted out on a fake talk show, called a lard-ass in front of a national TV audience, and force-fed vegetable juice. But in a dramatic turn of events that seems a little too convenient, Brent Jr. gobbles down Montel’s sludgy concoction and winds up with a big smile on his face and a green goo mustache on his lip. (The segment ends there, baffling most members of the audience, who were still anxiously waiting for a DNA test to reveal his real father.)
In another segment of the “talk show,” Montel introduces us to his “Medical Dream Team.” Surprisingly, it does not consist of Tommy Chong, Woody Harrelson, and Snoop Dogg. Instead we are introduced to a nutritionist, an author, and “our own Dr. Mike.” Without a doubt “Dr. Mike” is a credible medical authority because he wears a stethoscope throughout the show, even though there is no possibility of his ever needing such a tool. “Dr Mike” unveils a table stocked with various goodies, although he is able to show us only one of them up close: a tumor from a human colon, the kind of thing regularly consuming vegetables is supposed prevent:
Showing us a cancerous part from inside someone’s colon is really gross—not as gross as the thought of Sylvia Browne naked, but gross.
Videos
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Sylvia Browne Highlights
Highlights from Sylvia Browne's appearance, including her sexy wiggle and a psychic reading that Montel Williams turns into a crass plug.
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"It's Montel Chilliams"
In this MADtv sketch, Montel Williams raps about how he likes to relax after a show with some natural green herb. And Sylvia Browne shows up here, too!