A tiny miracle takes place at the end of most mornings — around 11:59, in some parts of the country, or 10:59 in others.
It’s at the end of “The Price Is Right.” Drew Carey announces the winner of the “Showcase” round, capping off another glitzy hour of commercialism-as-gamesmanship, and then he faces the camera. The winners can be seen behind him, celebrating their prizes (a trip! a Jet Ski! patio furniture!). Like his predecessor, Bob Barker, Carey encourages viewers to spay or neuter their pets.
But unlike Barker, Carey caps his goodbye with a three-word phrase that cuts right through the cacophony of sound and light and cheering of the studio in Glendale, Calif., and maybe also the drudgery at home on the other side of the television: the bored or frenzied stay-at-home parents, the sick kids home from school, the residents awaiting lunch at the assisted-living facility.
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Carey says these words quickly but firmly. His tone and inflection rarely change. It’s a routine, like something you would say without thinking to a parent or a spouse at the end of a phone call. And yet Carey — whom you don’t know, and who doesn’t know you — says it to America.
“I love you.”
A beacon of hope but almost as subtle as station identification.
End of carouselHe’s not the first to offer affirmations at the end of a show that is otherwise empty of them. Jerry Springer always ended his wild program with a placid “final thought” segment, a moment reserved for a brief, ironic monologue about congeniality.
But he didn’t say, “I love you.”
How does something so common feel so radical?
Since Carey began hosting “The Price Is Right” in 2007, we’ve had multiple recessions, several wars, a global pandemic, assaults on democracy, countless mass shootings, violent political divides, forest fires, hurricanes, inflation, and on and on and on and on.
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We’re in a world that could use a little love from our screens, and Carey provides it — unjudging, unequivocally, unabashed.
“It’s a practice I got in, in my adult life,” Carey told CBS Chicago in January. “I treat everybody I meet with love, as if they were a friend already. … And it really changes everything.”
Added Carey, “Better than a smack in the face, right?”
We’re not talking about uncomfortable modifiers, like the one used in the 2009 movie “I Love You, Man.” We’re talking about the phrase — subject, verb, object — employed in full and in earnest.
In a culture increasingly open to therapy and interested in self-care, have we finally arrived at a place where saying “I love you” outside of family or a romantic relationship is not only accepted but lauded?
It’s a common conversation on the social media site Reddit. “We should normalize saying ‘I love you’ to friends,” one post said this year in a thread titled “r/unpopularopinion.” It was upvoted more than 10,500 times.
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Also this year, writer Hanif Abdurraqib tweeted, “a small adjustment I’ve made to my communication practice is saying ‘I love you’ at the start of conversations/interactions with the people I love, instead of (only) at the end — I actually picked up on it by watching an elder interact with their peers & adopted it for myself.”
Share this articleShareIn a short, viral video last month, an airplane pilot giving a teary retirement speech tells his passengers, “I love all of you.”
The gentlemen who host the “SmartLess” podcast — actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett — often say it warmly and easily to each other and to their guests at the end of episodes. Not “Love you, bro” or some decaffeinated variation but, “I love you.”
Forget the teenage boys of the 2007 film “Superbad,” who drunkenly express their platonic love for each other — only to wake up embarrassed. Or the guys in a recent Infiniti commercial who can only say “I love you” via text message. Or the fictional character envisioned by this Onion headline: “Man accidentally ends business call with ‘I love you.’”
The writers behind these gags, of course, understood that the more unexpected the source of the phrase — teenage boys, finance bros — the more powerful it can be. Former president Donald Trump also understands this, and he seized on that power early in his political career. For all his machismo and bluster, he routinely deployed “I love you” at rallies. He said it in both his speech before the storming of the Capitol and in his video message urging the rioters to go home.
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Perhaps the most unexpected “I love you” — and therefore the most moving — came from Norm Macdonald. The comedian always avoided sincerity. The man, after all, wrote a fake memoir.
Which made the end of his final stand-up set on “The Late Show With David Letterman” so astounding. After a nearly eight-minute stand-up set riffing on LSD and cellphones, Norm dropped the veil for perhaps the first and only time, to address his hero directly.
“I know that Mr. Letterman is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental,” Norm says. “But if something is true, it’s not sentimental.”
His voice cracks.
“And I say, in truth, I love you.”
Bold. Vulnerable. Touching. Letterman could only muster, “Oh my God.”
Like Carey says: Better than a smack in the face, right?
Sure is. But just as surprising, somehow.
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