My Tuesday With Maury

Though I’d never consciously spent time thinking it over, on some primary level I was pretty sure I had Maury all figured out. Anyone with a healthy dose of cynicism can probably relate to my perception of the tabloid-trash show: the catfights and audience reactions are fake, while the makeovers and Maury Povich’s half-zip cashmere pullovers are real—or are, at the very least, premium pima-cotton blend.

So I jumped at the chance to head down to Penn Plaza a couple of weeks ago when Maury hosted a college conference in celebration of the show’s 10th anniversary on air. A full morning was promised: a tour of the studio, a live taping, and an interview with the man himself. I assumed it would be like seat-filling at Saturday Night Live: a couple of hours of cartoonish, scripted entertainment, with the occasional off-the-cuff improvised moment thrown in for good measure.

The tour was brief, but it revealed lapses in the show’s realism factor that I’d never stopped to consider. The bricks in the wall are fake, for one thing—it’s not the biggest deal, but they’re made of some sort of indestructible linoleum substance, and they’re blue but appear red under the lights. It’s disconcerting. There are several racks of clothing, too, for the guests—when the taping began, girls in two separate segments wore the same maroon shell-and-shrug twinset. Again, not a big deal, but it begs the question: why? If guests show up from their homes (or lack thereof) all over America wearing ridiculous or cheap outfits, isn’t that better for the show? Doesn’t Maury thrive on its skankiness factor?

The short answer: of course it does. JC Penney career-casual outfits notwithstanding, the taping itself proved exactly what Maury’s public wants to see. We journalists (and the disconcertingly enthusiastic audience) were treated to several segments of Maury’s most popular subject. It’s taped the most because it consistently garners the highest ratings for the show—higher than lie-detector tests, violent teen girls, transsexuals, disfigured people. Higher, even, than obese children.

I’m talking, of course, of baby-daddies. The setup is familiar: a woman drags her husband, boyfriend, or one-time hookup on the show, sure that he is responsible for the birth of her infant or toddler. He denies it, often calling her a slut. Maury opens a brown envelope and announces the results. There is crying or gloating or both. Then they go home, and the audience gets pizza!

Maybe it was just my front-row seat, but what seems so obviously staged, so laughable, on TV gains an eerie surreality when viewed live. Before the show, women from the audience were invited to dance onstage to “Party Like a Rock Star” in anticipation of Povich’s arrival. The man came onstage to warm up the crowd for a moment, and someone shouted, “Hey, Maury!” Smiling, he replied, “Hello, dear. You my boo!”

And there it is, the essential contradiction that sets Povich apart from the others of his ilk, for better or worse. He’s a fish not quite out of water, in his leather loafers, with his perfect teeth. “I’m an empathetic guy, and I want the best for all our guests,” Povich said later in our interview, but empathy isn’t the right word. At best, it’s a tenuous sympathy—Povich seems to understand the culture of trash, and how best to manipulate it for a TV audience, without ever exactly identifying with it. And the saddest realization I had at Maury is that there is, in fact, something with which to identify. It may seem naïve, but when you’ve been there, you just know: these people are real people. The bricks may not be real, but the stories are. You can’t fake the blind terror that popped up on one girl’s face when she learned her guy wasn’t the father, before she bolted offstage in four-inch stilettos.

So why did she come on the show in the first place? I asked Povich later why women came for the paternity tests if they weren’t 100 percent monogamous at the time of conception. Why risk that kind of humiliation, being outed as a painted Jezebel in front of dozens of jeering audience members and three million viewers at home, if you’re not absolutely sure? Povich called it “an act of desperation on their part,” citing monetary constraints in many of these women’s lives—a DNA test that will hold up in court costs about $500, and the show provides them free to couples who take the risk. Nice enough, I suppose, but I refuse to believe this isn’t exploitative: throughout the six segments we saw, one producer squatted at the edge of the stage, furiously scribbling cues on posterboard: “GO OFF ON HER,” one sign advised a guest’s new girlfriend, and later, “THINK OF YOUR FATHER.”

It was apparent from the interview that Povich is a man used to justifying his place in the pop-culture canon. In his initial comments about the show, he said his enterprise highlights social problems that are otherwise repressed by politicians and the popular media: “There is an issue of men not taking care of their children, if they have them; and women playing with their lives in terms of sexuality, and sleeping with a lot of men around the same time and not knowing who the fathers are.” When I asked whether he thinks his show is working to solve these problems, however, the answer was less pat. “There are individual stories that we do have an impact on,” he said. “...I don’t know if I’ve had an impact beyond that. I would not claim that. I can’t say that there are more fathers in kids’ lives because of my show.”

Of course, though Povich does rationalize his show a bit, he also gives off an indelible vibe of not really caring whether we think it’s trash. And after 10 years and countless paternity tests, that only makes sense. By now, he’s heard every criticism that could be leveled against his show (almost all, in fact, can be found in a single column by Wendy Matheson in USA Today, which called Maury “miles farther down the commode than Jerry Springer or Jenny Jones”). He’s come to terms with his detractors. And, whether America likes it or not, the show does keep him in cashmere sweaters and tailored slacks—or, perhaps, did. “I may leave at the end of this year,” he said. “Depends on how I feel.”

He continued, “I’ll tell you what I’ll probably do. I’ll probably go to one of your universities, and ask if I can teach a course on the art of the interview.” Later, while he was taking pictures with each college journalist in turn, I suggested Columbia. He asked whether I really thought we’d have him. Of course, I said yes, and that I thought undergraduate enrollment in a course he taught would be huge.

I wonder, though, whether Columbia students would be receptive to a man who’s made a career out of exposing the very same kind of reality we’ve all managed to escape—I’d imagine any Columbia student who had doubts about a baby’s paternity could find the means to figure it out privately. And is my outrage at the exploitation of these people hypocritical? Is it just a mutation of the very same tenuous sympathy of which I accused Povich himself? It’s something to think about, anyway, and something to ask Professor Povich should he ever hold office hours.