Title:Maury (Sometimes called The Maury Povich Show)
Host: Maury Povich
Format: One-hour tabloid talk show. Tabloid talk shows are known for inviting controversial guests and setting up moments of conflict or volatility. Subject matter is often melodramatic, prurient and taboo.
Broadcast Information:Maury is broadcast in syndication. Check your local listings for show times. The show is broadcast in fewer markets than in its most popular days in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The show has had several production companies over the years, including MoPo Productions, Paramount Television, Studios USA and Universal Television.
Premiere Date: September 9, 1991.
Brief History:
Maury began life as The Maury Povich Show in 1991, following in the footsteps of popular issues shows of the day, like Donahue and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Back then, daytime shows like these would tackle political issues, family issues and other topics top of mind for its target audience - young stay-at-home mothers and fathers whose work focus was on managing the home.
The show starred well-respected journalist Maury Povich. Povich started out as a news reporter for a local Washington, D.C., station, and eventually became the host of the station's popular midday talk show. His eventually worked as a reporter and news anchor at stations in some of the U.S.'s biggest markets: Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
His professional style and ease on camera caught the eye of billionaire broadcasting titan Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch hired Povich to anchor his early evening infotainment news program, A Current Affair. Povich spent four-years on A Current Affair before leaving to launch The Maury Povich Show.
During his first few seasons, Povich focused on serious topics, inviting honest debate on social and political issues. But competition soon grew from shows like The Jerry Springer Show and Ricki Lake. Those daytime programs, originally struggling in the ratings, were finding success by covering more taboo subjects and encouraging guests to raise the level of debate from arguing to - in some cases - actual physical conflict.
The age of tabloid talk shows had arrived.
Turning to the tabloid
To stay competitive, The Maury Povich Show had to change the way it was doing business on television. So it underwent a major overhaul, changed its title to Maury, and joined the world of trash TV.
The focus shifted from news to nutjobs. Maury's guests came on set to chat about sexual infidelity, makeovers, obese children, unusual phobias, fortune telling and more. But Maury soon became known for its almost weekly paternity test episodes.
A typical episode with a paternity focus would find a mother arguing for - or against - whether a certain male was - or wasn't - the father of her child. The alleged father would argue why he wasn't the father. Often a paternity test would be conduct and the surprise results revealed on-air.
On the flip side, men who fathered a child for many years would come on set to discover whether they were the actual father of the child. Suspicion of infidelity is usually the cause, and, similarly, a paternity test is conducted to determine whether the man is the actual father of the child or not.
Shows like these have led many critics to consider Maury a worse program than other tabloid shows, like Springer. The reason often given is because Maury is generally unsympathetic to its guests, using their problems for the show's audience entertainment.
While not as popular and not in as many markets today as it once was, Maury maintains a solid audience base. This has led to its renewal through at least 2014.