Had to workout a little early today, so I just caught the very beginning of the show. Looks like a number of women contending that various deadbeats are the daddies of their babies. Fun for the whole family!
They aren’t actors. My wife’s aunt was on Maury Povich a few years ago and we have the video tape somewhere. It wasn’t a super-bad one. It was a make-over show specializing in kids who were afraid of their parent’s appearance. My wife’s aunt and her husband were real bikers and had some very trashy biker clothes. A limo picked them up in New Hampshire and drove them to NYC. The parents wore the worst clothes they had and their son who was about 10 sat in the audience. They all got coached a little but it was basically real. When the parents came out on stage in their biker clothes, the son was coached to put his hands over his face and cry. Then, they took both of them and gave them a makeover and come back out where the son had to express joy.
After the show, they took the new clothes back and sent them home on a bus. My wife’s aunt died young after that and that tape is the best thing the family has to remember her by unfortunately.
A lot of Jerry Springer’s guests over the years have been fakes. That’s not to say all of them, but even the ones that were “real” were so coached that they may as well have been fakes.
News to me! I don’t doubt that it has happened, but a friend of mine worked on the show in its early years and all she ever saw was pure, unbridled, real-life craziness. It was actually her job at one point to calm down guests before they went on.
Clearly some of the people are fakes who lied about their situations to get on the show as a lark. If they’re entertaining enough, the producers aren’t going to care and don’t have a vested interest in checking the veracity of their story.
Back in the 90’s there was a Canadian comedy trio who managed to get on something like five different shows. They were two men and a woman and for each show that created a totally different scenario and played different characters. They attempted to be insanely over the top but ended up just fitting in with the other guests.
My favorite Maury was when a woman confessed to her one-legged boyfriend on his birthday that she didn’t really have a job – she was a prostitute!!!
I guess I was watching it in a rubbernecking kind of way, then realized just how dirty it made me feel. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a bit of it since.
Back when I was in college, Maury would be on in the background a lot. They had a run of Who’s-My-Baby-Daddy shows (did that phrase get coined from them?) where the same girl kept bringing guys on, and none of them were the daddy. Every time she was so sure. I think she might have been on the show six times, and never found out who the daddy was. It was awful.