Montel Williams is Matt Waters

Montel Williams News Archive 1996

The Detroit News By Curt Schleier

January 3, 1996

Montel Williams is Matt Waters

Caption: Montel Williams and Nicole Wilson play struggling teachers in the new CBS drama "Matt Waters."
When Montel Williams was a young man in Baltimore, he recalls, his parents "instilled a very serious work ethic in me."
It stood him in good stead in the Navy, where he spent 110 days under the sea in a submarine. It helped him work his way up from being a motivational speaker for teen-agers to getting his own syndicated TV talk show.
And it has stood him in good stead over the last two months, when he has been working two days a week taping his talk show and the rest of the time filming his new CBS drama, Matt
Waters, which premieres tonight at 9 on Channel 62.
Williams plays the title character, a former Navy SEAL, who, following the drive-by murder of his brother, retires from the service and returns to his old neighborhood to teach at his old high school. It is a program in many ways derivative of old shows like Room 222 and The White Shadow, where strong, caring teachers did their best to help students cope with growing up in an urban environment.
But it will have a definite '90s reality twist, Williams says in a telephone interview.
"We want to keep the show as real as we can. It will be an emotional roller coaster. You step on at the beginning and get off at the end after quite a ride."
Expect the show to become more real as the season progresses. It was originally ordered for the 8 p.m. "family hour" time slot. Now that it's been pushed back an hour "it opens us up a little more," Williams says. "We can pick more hard-hitting topics than we had planned."
If this sounds like an opening for some of the topics on current talk shows, it is. Many of the problems Montel the talk host deals with will be similar to those facing Matt Waters the teacher: gang violence, drugs, teen pregnancies.
But the show's denouements won't always be as uplifting as they were on Room 222 and White Shadow in the '60s and '70s.
In the third episode of Matt Waters, for example, a young woman leaves her child on the doorstep of a friend, one of the series' main characters. He and other students take care of the infant for the day, while they try to figure out what to do with him. Waters helps them look for the mother.
Fifteen years ago, a similar group on 222 or White Shadow would not only have found her, but convinced her to go back to school and make a better life for herself and the child. In this episode, though, the mother has disappeared and the baby is turned over to a social worker. Fade to commercial.
Since Williams created the show and brought it to CBS, it's not surprising that he shares several characteristics with the fictional Matt Waters. Both are Navy veterans who left the service to work with young people. Of course, Waters is a teacher and Williams is a multimillionaire TV host and actor. But then, truth is often richer than fiction.
Williams was born in Baltimore in 1956 in "a small ghetto" that has since been gentrified, he says. Both his parents worked more than one job. His father's main job was city fireman. But because he was paid less than his white peers, he also worked as a carpenter and musician.
"This was in the 1950s in America," Williams says, bitterness in his voice. "Black people got paid one thing, white people got paid another."
Fortunately, he comes from a family that does not allow racism to stand in its way. His dad is currently chief of the Baltimore Fire Department. And when the family moved to a suburb where Montel was bused to primarily white schools, he essentially took over, serving as president of his high school junior and senior classes, student representative to the board of education and in other local and regional posts.
After high school, he enlisted in the Marines to qualify for college tuition money.
Anyone who has watched the Montel Williams Show, now in its fourth season (4 p.m. daily on Channel 4 in Detroit) knows that the host is bright and verbal, qualities not lost on Marine officers who put him on a fast track. He received several SPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMs, he says,and became the first black enlisted man assigned to the Naval Academy prep school. He then got a presidential appointment to the Naval Academy, where he finished with a degree in engineering and a minor in international security affairs.
Over the next decade, he served in a variety of duty stations, picked up a degree in Russian (to go with the Mandarin Chinese he studied at Annapolis), served with the U.S. naval task force during the invasion of Grenada and traveled the world.
In one assignment, he counseled the families of sailors under his command to help them cope with the sailors' frequent and lengthy absences. Shortly after, he addressed a meeting at Kansas State University of the Big Eight Black Students Union. His subjects: leadership and overcoming obstacles to success. He was so well received, he says, that educators attending the conference invited him to speak at high schools.
Williams eventually resigned his commission to devote full time to motivational lectures. It was the late 1980s, and the anti-drug message he was delivering to young, urban audiences attracted media attention. His theme of self-empowerment and leadership also attracted corporate sponsors.
Finally, he came to the attention of producer Freddie Fields, who led Williams (willingly) into the talk-show syndication marketplace. And that led to Matt Waters.
CBS has ordered seven episodes. But even if the show proves a hit and CBS renews, Williams intends to keep doing his talk show, shooting some of the episodes during his talk-show hiatus. That show, like others, has come under increasing fire recently from those who say the topics and the guests often glorify dysfunctional behavior.
"I agree that a lot of my peers have crossed the line and they can turn around and say the same thing about me," he says. "
(But) we're the only show that hired a psychologist to run an after-care program for us. We have put people through residential treatment programs for drugs, took teen-age prostitutes off the street, and that's what we do on a daily basis.
"I can tell you we've not had one stripper, one fight, one transvestite on the show in over a year. We've tried to move forward."