Call Me Miss Cleo: What We Can Learn From the TV Psychic
With the recent release of HBOMax's documentary 'Call Me Miss Cleo,' there's been a renewed interest in the TV psychic. During the late 90s and early 2000s, you couldn't turn on the television without seeing her commercials. She'd hold a mock reading, tell some paid actress that she was being cheated on by her husband, and shout, 'Call me now!'It was all so ridiculous. At that time, we had all heard about 1-800 and 1-900 number scams. There were sex phone operators, information hotlines, paid horoscopes in the form of prerecorded messages--even celebrities like Corey Feldman and Hulk Hogan who'd claim to come on the line for only $5 a minute. Nobody actually took these commercials seriously. They were the equivalent of a Nigerian prince or a random man hitting you up in your DMs. We knew better, and we were all very aware that some of these hotlines were capable of charging your phone bill directly; others would steal your credit card number and charge you without your permission. People would get strange bills and letters, accusing them of fraud, often threatening to sue. Some had never even considered calling one of these scam artists, but somehow or other, they found themselves in their crosshairs. Miss Cleo was no different. The company she worked for, the Psychic Readers Network (PRN), latched on to a fad that began in the late 80s and early 90s. Psychic hotlines would pay celebrities like Latoya Jackson and Tori Spelling to film lengthy infomercials where actors would pretend to be shocked during readings. They'd gasp and cry out like they'd actually encountered real psychism. It was compelling to watch, but they couldn't be more obvious. Someone had figured out how to lure people in, even though they knew they had been defrauded. Many would call just to see how the con worked, and there was this inexplicable suspension of disbelief. Maybe it was real. Who was to say?
