Wade Armstrong

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The Messengers Episode 5 Recap

Posted Sunday August 27, 2006 in Business

No, you haven’t missed the last four entries recapping this show — I missed the last four episodes. The Messengers is a new series on TLC that challenges experienced speakers to become America’s “next great inspirational speaker,” and I’ll recap the episodes I didn’t miss here.

I learned about The Messengers just this week, from a blast e-mail sent out by Toastmasters here in Southern California. Last year I served as President of the Toastmasters club at the USC Marshall School of Business; my two years at that club gave me a great opportunity to learn more about being an effective public speaker.

One of the things we did every week in Toastmasters was to give each other feedback on how we were and weren’t effective in our speeches. This kind of open and positive feedback — criticism always had to be paired with concrete suggestions for improvement — really helped us become better speakers. As a group of people learning to speak better, each of us tended to make the same errors as the rest, and we all got to confront these errors together. In each episode of The Messengers, I’ll try to look for a similar, consistent weakness or mistake that some or all of the speakers show, and talk about how to avoid that mistake.

The Messengers’ episodes have a consistent formula — the contestants are taken on a “field trip,” on which they are exposed to something moving (in the terms of the series, they “experience life through others’ eyes”). They’re then given a simple topic on which to present, a topic informed by that field trip. Each speaker gives a 2-3 minute speech on that topic in front of an audience, and then the audience votes for the best speech; the speaker with the lowest vote total is sent home. All speakers are given feedback from the two judges, communications consultant Richard Greene and televangelist Bobby Schuller, son and heir of the famous Robert Schuller. The winner gets a book publishing contract and a show on TLC.

This week’s episode brought the Messengers to the LA County Coroner’s office, to see what happens when a person dies alone, forgotten, or lost, and becomes a John or Jane Doe. First the contestants were brought into a walk-in cooler containing the bodies of hundreds of John and Jane Does, then they got to see an autopsy. Finally, they stood by a preacher who said a brief service over a mass grave containing the ashes of a year’s worth of John and Jane Does, left unclaimed. Obviously affected by the sight of so many unknown and lost people, most of the contestants cried at one point; Angelica broke down completely when she saw the little arm of an anonymous baby poke out from a body bag. The producers maximized the effect of this segment by shooting in black and white, and I give them credit for eschewing gruesome footage of bodies and autopsies for tight shots showing us the contestants’ reactions. Too bad they went cheesy with a minute-and-a-half-long retrospective of moving clips and sad music, helping us to look back on… the contestants’ experiences in the previous ten minutes of the show.

After their experience, the contestants were challenged to give a eulogy for these John and Jane Does. Watching the tour of the morgue and the interment ceremony, my first thought was “I wonder what these Does’ stores were, how they became forgotten or lost or otherwise alone,” and it was clear from the eulogies that the contestants had the same thought, as four of the six remaining explicitly told stories of an individual John or Jane Doe and one referred in general terms to such a lost person. These stories ranged from a bit trite, such as Daneea’s eulogy to the life of “Mr. Somebody Special,” which fortunately finished strong; to the outright fabricated, in Iman’s tragic story which he claimed to have researched about a real person who lost his family through disaster after disaster — but, of course, if the county could have found this out the individual wouldn’t have been buried as a John Doe, so what are the chances that Iman actually unearthed the story?

Angelica and Robert took a different approach, speaking in general about traits that almost all people were likely to share, and building a person that we can all imagine in general terms, personalize in our own thoughts, and then lose. Angelica of course spoke about the baby Doe who had so affected her, saying “You who deserved roller coasters and birthday cakes, to be showered with kisses, ring around the rosies, and throwing pennies in fountains to make big wishes…” and what baby doesn’t deserve these? Robert talked about loving dogs and family and normal everyday things, although in the end his delivery was a bit flat and he was almost so general as to miss the heartstrings.

“See”, who got the most audience votes in this episode, said only “let’s not call her Jane Doe, let’s call her Beautiful,” and then moved on to talk about how death is inevitable and life must be lived well. Only Darryl, in a moving Martin Luther King-style speech, got beyond the individual to talk about how we’re surrounded by John and Jane Does every day, anonymous homeless and hopeless people to whom we must reach out to help. It was these last two speeches that really rose above, because they talked about universal truths rather than single, unknown stories. Any speech that can get down to a gestalt concept that its whole audience must agree on — live your life well, we should be a profitable company, we need to help workers be productive, we need to serve customers — will be an effective speech.

In contrast, the first two speeches seemed almost mendacious, because how could anything specific be known about an anonymous person? The audience must have known that these stories were fabricated, and anybody who catches a speaker in a lie will tend not to trust the speaker’s other points, so be scrupulously honest and clear in presenting, or at least explain your spin well.

While Robert lost and was eliminated — probably because, while his words were excellent, his delivery was weak — the first three speakers made a fundamental error from which they were only rescued by their solid delivery. Daneea, Iman, and Angelica all tried to fit two points into their two-to-three minute eulogy, far too much content to coherently express in such a short time. Either one point was lost, or both became confused; for Angelica, in particular, it seemed that the second point came from nowhere and then suddenly disappeared. Most speakers will be better off sticking to one point. If you have time to make several points it’s still best if all that you have to say is organized around a general theme, as that helps your audience make sense of what’s going on. Another technique — one that See used well — was to have two points but bring them together at the end of the speech, which allowed the two points to reinforce each other. I can’t tell you how many speeches I’ve heard that would be two or three good, separate speeches, but instead were one single, confusing presentation. Stay on-topic, and on just one topic, to be a stronger speaker; don’t rely on a moving presentation to pull it off, as many of this episode’s speakers did.