This paper analyzes excerpts of talk from two live shows on Iranian national TV, namely Navad (‗Ninety‘), a 2-decade old popular show on soccer in Iran, and Mah-e Asal (‗Month of Honey‘/‗Honey Moon‘), another decade-old Ramadan-specific reality TV talk show. The study is done in two phases. In phase 1 is conducted a detailed conversation analysis of each talk and moments of impoliteness evaluation are identified based on participants‘ linguistic uptake and nonverbal cues. The results show that impoliteness evaluations arise when the host offers a negative evaluation of an aspect of the shakhsiat or ‗self‘ (Izadi, 2017; Koutlaki, 2002) or ‗identity‘ of a guest (cf. Kádár and Haugh, 2013). In phase 2, metapragmatic comments of 60 viewers (30 for each talk) are analyzed. The analysis of the metapragmatic comments shows that viewers‘ judgments are primarily based on their perception of an impolite intention (Locher and Watts, 2008; Culpepper, 2011), the perception itself being dependent on the conversational style of each host. Also, a correlation was found between levels of expectation in the moral order (Kádár and Haugh, 2013) and ‗polite/neutral‘ or ‗impolite‘ evaluations: while those who evaluated a talk or part of it impolite mainly referred to the norms of the moral order at the societal/cultural level, those who evaluated the interactions polite or neutral mostly appealed to expectations at the community of practice or localized level.
