TV critic: I will miss the Suze Smackdown

Washington Post television critic Hank Stuever writes about what he will miss with the ending of Suze Orman‘s personal finance show on CNBC after 13 years.

Stuever writes, “Not everyone who came on ‘The Suze Orman Show; was desperate. In her popular ‘Can I Afford It?’ segments, in which callers asked for her permission to make a big purchase (APPROVED! Or, perhaps more often, DENIIIIIIIED!), they often demonstrated that they had amassed small fortunes in retirement accounts and saved the cash equivalent of eight months or more of living expenses in case they lost their jobs. The stories you saw on ‘The Suze Orman Show’ occasionally felt like unreported good news during the recession — a lot of people were doing fine, and still are.

“Such information also had the effect of making other viewers jealous of one another (how did someone making less money than I do put so much into retirement in just half the time that I’ve been saving?), but that was the point of all this sharing: Once a number is out there, it’s also not as scary.

“Americans blab about everything except their own money. What I loved most about ‘The Suze Orman Show’ is that guests had to provide all their financial data in order to get her advice, no matter how humiliating the numbers might be. The payoff for viewers was both educational and vicarious. It was also the only place in our money-crazed culture where you could hear consumers being told, ‘no.’ What could be more fun than witnessing what became known as a Suze Smackdown?”

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