Yesterday while working out, the gym’s TV was set to Maury. I have realized that this type of show existed for some time, but I haven’t seen one in years and years. Seeing this debacle yesterday raised a few questions I was hoping you might share your thoughts on:
-Where on earth do they get these “guests”? They were advertising something like “Do you have a secret you want to surprise someone with on TV?” Yesterday’s show involved engaged or married couples where the woman thought the man was unfaithful. The guys all agreed to take lie detector tests, which - SURPRISE - revealed them to be dogs.
What demographic of our population is represented by people who think it being on a show like this is a good idea? Are these people really the “bottom of the barrel”, or are they representative of a large section of our country?
-Why do people watch shows like this? Do they think they learn something? Are they sympathetic for the guests? Do they think it funny?
-What does a host like Povich think of himself? Does he believe he is providing a service? Or does he just acknowledge that he is a whore earning a living however he can?
I was surprised at how strongly this show affected me. So distasteful, and sad. In ways it was like the car wreck you are repused by, yet can’t take your eyes off. Weird stuff.
Hope they have my soaps back on today. I gotta see what Erica has planned next for her fellow members of the orange jumpsuit brigade!
The last time I watched Maury was in college. At the time, his format was more about “baby daddys”, though I do remember a few lie detector shows. Most of the guests seemed like attention whores. Every once in a while, he would do a “feel-good” show, like the one with the massively overweight toddler whose favorite thing to say was “french fries” (the parents couldn’t figure out how she kept gaining weight!).
My reason for watching was a lack of cable at the house where I was watching TV. Maury really was the best thing on at the time, according to the TV’s owner. It was entertaining to think about where the show found its guests.
It is sad, isn’t it? I feel bad for the kids in the baby daddy shows. Parents (and sometimes grandparents) screaming at each other, every other word bleeped out. Daddy calling mommy a whore and then when the DNA says he’s the daddy he says he’ll “step up” and be a daddy. You know the yelling and screaming won’t ever stop and the kid will never see a dime of child support, and mommy will be back on the show next year, yelling at another sperm donor.
The mommies must want to be on TV. I don’t know why the daddies show up – maybe they get a free trip to wherever the show is taped. Aren’t there other, more private ways to prove paternity?
Well, if it works like here (or so I was told by a few different people who were not experts, so I could be wrong) the mother pays for the test if the prospective father isn’t the one while the father pays if he is proven to be the daddy.
Either way, someone pays for the test. This way it’s Maury who foots the bill.
I used to comfort myself by believing these people were actors. However, I work in a lab with a doctor who did some testing (and testifying) connected with a situation presented on the Springer show, so that’s put a dent in my theory. All I can figure is that some people like attention that much.
I’d guess people watch in order to enjoy a little recreational outrage and feel superior to someone.
What does Povich think? Maybe, “I’m rich, I’m rich!”
This lab also does paternity testing (in fact, I’m the person you’d talk with about that) and in the two or three years we’ve done it, we’ve only had one family behave like Maury guests.
Maury is taped in New York City. Don’t you want free trip, with room and board and swanky midtown hotel, and you get free paternity/lie detector test* and to air out you dirty laundry on TV!?
I was sort of watching yesterday right before I left the house. They had a married couple, wife-16 (that’s right) and husband-25, or something like that. They got married when she was 15.
Anywhoo, they did the usual lie detector stuff but with an (almost) redeeming twist. They went over the results (I was half-listening) - love her (yes), still attracted to her (yes), regretted marriage (yes), marriage just b/c of baby (yes), etc.
The twist was that they had Dr. Jeffrey Gardere go over the result and talk about how, although some of the harder stuff hurt, this was the husband’s emotional truth and, being so young and immature, she shouldn’t fault for that and use the information to work things out.
It wasn’t their usual “Took the lie detector test knowin’ I’ll fail (or thinkin’ I smoove enough to trick it)” or "Who the baby daddy, this time – What :: run off the stage :: bullshit.
I sitll think Maury should have been cancelled 5 years ago though.
P.S. Jerry has evolved to presented scripted vignettes of psychopathy, such as the dyke who demolished a car on air because her girlfriend went back to her baby daddy.
The newspaper where I used to work used to accept ads for guests to appear on these shows. They were placed by an advertising agency, so I didn’t know if they were for a particular show or for a pool for the shows to draw from. But they’d have lurid lines like “**DO YOU THINK YOUR SPOUSE IS CHEATING? ** Daytime talk show seeks guests! Call 1-800-XXX-YYYY.” They were small ads, but ran fairly regularly for a couple years. Don’t know why they stopped; maybe they run in rotating cities.
Before there were “baby daddy” episodes, there was like a whole year of “HELP! MY TEENAGE DAUGHTER IS OUT OF CONTROL!” episodes (yes, the capslock was necessary). Anyway. these girls would be 12 or 13 (they were popular on Sally Jessie too) and they would dress like “sluts” and go out partying every night and have lots of sex. They had more boundary issues than the Balkans. The cure was to have Maury foot the bill to send them to “boot camp” to scare them straight.
These episodes always made me so sad. It was so obvious to me these girls suffered from some sort of abuse in their past (most like sexual) and had several of the symptoms. The last thing they needed was to be sent to a boot camp where a big man got in their face and shouted them down, telling them they were worthless etc. How was that supposed to help? Because the girls needed discipline? They needed therapy, and possibly medication.
I know a lot of people hate Dr. Phil, but at least his producers make sure the guests are referred to doctors in private practice who can oversee their care after the show is taped.
Just the memory of these episodes make me want to puke.
Well, there is an obvious answer
They have had them, though. One of them was a case where the adult child was given up for adoption, and the “mother” wanted to find out if the other lady was indeed her daughter (she didn’t want her to be, and she wasn’t). They also tested a baby and the possible grandmother after the baby daddy died (she is the grandmother!). They did a paternity test on a transgendered woman once too (she is the father!).
Please don’t hold it against me that I watch the show.
I was kind of kidding, but wasn’t actually thinking through to where that would be useful.
Hey, I “watch” it, meaning I’ll put it on when I’m doing something (hurriedly getting dressed for work) where I need “ear-caffeine” but nothing to absorbing.
Am I imagining this, or has Maury switched to having a lot more “Paternity Test” shows than before? I swear he used to only have a few compared to the “Makeover Shows”, the “Freak Couples Shows”, the “Disfiguring and/or Debilitating Disease Shows” and the “African Animals On Stage Shows”, but now it seems 80% are him saying “You ARE the father!”. Maybe it’s only where I live?
Just curious - why do you make the choice to watch this show instead of anything else that’s on? What - if any - emotional/intellectual response do you have from it? Or does it make no impression on you?
I’m not the kind of person who turns on the TV for background, but if I were, I imagine I’d prefer putting on the westher channel or old sitcoms instead of this.
I don’t mean to be trite, but I watch it for entertainment value. I find some of it damn amusing. Thankfully there haven’t been any out of control teens going to boot camp shows for years that I’ve seen - these are all cheating/baby daddy/other nonsense type shows. Pepperlandgirl was right - those WERE sad - those kids needed real help, not to be exploited on TV. Hopefully that’s why those types of shows aren’t on anymore - someone wised up. Now, the Maury/Jerry genre is just kinda funny in a “trainwreck of clowns” kind of way - and we can’t help but watch.
It doesn’t hurt to be drinking while you’re watching it - we usually see it at the bar. When there isn’t anything else on to speak of it’s something to laugh at - it isn’t taken real seriously. Perhaps, though, we’re all just a bunch of shallow idiots. That’s entirely possible. And besides, you know me, Dins, I don’t have much of an “intellectual” response to ANYthing.
Yeah, I guess I can understand a fleeting thought of that. And maybe my perspective has changed as I near the end of my 5th decade and my kids start to bolt the nest. Hell, maybe I’m undergoing menopause and it is the hormones talking! But the whole thing just struck me as so pathetic, I was unable to derive enjoyment from it.
Either you figure the guests are actors, or they are really that big of losers. Are they truly the bottom of the American barrel, or is there a significant percentage of our society that conducts their relationships in this manner? If they are a minute percentage of losers, then I feel almost dirty finding their misadventures entertaining. And if they represent a significant portion of American society/culture, then that’s just a damned depressing commentary on the state of our nation.
And IMO it says something not entirely complimentary about our culture that people will watch and advertisers will advertise on something that appears so exploitative of individuals who are so obviously lacking in so many respects.
It amazes and dismays me that this type of material would be considered more appropriate for free TV than - say - pornography.
Boston Legal addressed tabloid TV a couple weeks ago, in a lawsuit similar to what happened after a Sally Jessy Raphael show a few years back. Alan Shore’s closing arguments are at page 9 of this transcript – a PDF file. I looked for a YouTube clip but couldn’t find one. It was good – James Spader sounded really pissed off.
He answers the question about why there are so many of these kinds of shows, and reality TV in general – they’re cheap and easy to produce. It’s no wonder that there are lots of viewers – reality shows are everywhere and they focus on people who don’t know any better than to let themselves be exploited.
I might watch a few minutes of Maury or Jerry Springer a couple times a week, usually when I’m eating lunch or just taking a break. I could watch something else, but with Maury and Jerry, I don’t have to turn on my brain. It doesn’t engage me. I can turn it on and off and not feel like I’m missing something.
[hijack]So how come La Kane’s in the jumpsuit? I quit watching about the time Babe somehow qualified for Pine Valley Sainthood and I couldn’t stand it anymore.[/hijack]
I admit that I do have the very bad habit of putting on the TV for backgrond noise since I live alone.
One of the reasons I ended up having Maury on the last couple of weeks is that I’m on a 12:00noon work start schedule right now. In addition, my very bad insomnia causes me to wake up early. I’ll switch on the local news then fall back asleep. When I do wake up for work, Maury is on that same channel. So, it’s not really a choice, just laziness.
What filters through even from the background? Like a trainwreck, I’m fascinated and saddened by the pathology displayed by those who play pawns to Povich’s themes of promiscuousness, low self-esteem, reckless behavior and misguided hypermasculinity, personified by his shows about “who the baby daddy?” and “are you cheating (again!), of course you are?” I’ll also wonder about who would want to air this on national TV. And, to be honest, I’m ashamed so many of them are black.
As for other shows at that particular time, if I turned to the only other channel I’d be interested in at that time, TVLand, it might slow me down since I particular like those shows. The patheticness of a lonely old bachelor, I guess.
Question: what made my post stand out for you? Don’t mind the questions, I’m just curious.
5-4 Sorry. Your post did not stick out any more than the other posters. And generally I was asking “why does anyone watch this?” I just used your post because it was convenient to quote. And i did not mean to criticize, merely inquiring as to your motivations/responses. Chanteuse - I only catch a few minutes here and there, if I am on an elliptical or bike in front of the TV. I just started using the gym since recovering from January foot surgery that ended my running career. But a few weeks back Erica had been kidnapped by some hispanic woman. Then the 2 of them attempted to sneak into the back of a truck for a ride to Chicago, and got locked in. The next time I caught it they were in jail.
I used to follow All My Kids pretty regularly back when I was in college - say 1980 or so. It is astounding to see some of the same actors playing the same characters nearly 30 years later. Tad, Jesse, and Angela definitely aren’t the young kids on the show anymore!
Dinsdale, I forgot that you were the OP and certainly wasn’t offended by the question, either from the pont of view as an originator of the thread or a participant.
