Maury Povich tells Ricki Lake why she 'scared the s---' out of other talk show hosts

Raechal ShewfeltMon, April 27, 2026 at 11:30 PM UTC

0

Maury Povich and Ricki Lake in the early years of their talk showsCredit: Ron Galella/getty; Bob Riha, Jr./GettyKey Points -

Maury Povich had former daytime talk show rival Ricki Lake on his podcast, On Par With Maury Povich.

The Cry-Baby actress had 'scared the s--- out of the rest' of the hosts at the time, he told her, because she was a fresh-faced twentysomething competing against older people.

Lake explained, as she has in the past, that she eventually decided to leave her show in the wake of 9/11.

Maury Povich and his contemporaries were terrified of Ricki Lake when her talk show debuted in 1993.

"You scared the s--- out of the rest of us," Povich told her on Monday's edition of On Par With Maury Povich. "When Ricki came on, you have to understand, the '90s were the golden age of daytime talk shows. I mean, there were 20 of us on the air, and most of us were in our 40s and 50s and maybe even older. And here comes this 23-year-old who gets the youngest audience of us all, and we were scared s---less."

Lake, the show's guest star, noted that many of her competitors made changes after her series premiered, two years after the debut of Maury.

"Well, you changed your formats, a lot of you," Lake said. "You changed the tone of the show. I don't know if I want credit for all of it."

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

Povich, whose own Maury became known for its paternity tests ("You are not the father!"), explained that talk shows of the era started "kind of tame" before they became the site of infamously bad behavior on The Jerry Springer Show, The Jenny Jones Show, and more.

Lake noted that, when she entered the marketplace, the genre was "skewing over 50."

After she left in 2004, Povich was "the youngest skewing," he said. Povich stayed on the air until 2022.

Advertisement

The end of their shows was also a topic of their conversation, with Povich noting that both left on top.

"I could've done it for maybe a decade longer," Lake said. "I made that choice... 9/11 was a huge trajectory shift in my life. Every aspect of my life changed from witnessing that experience that day from my West Village apartment. I was so freaked out watching that plane fly down the Hudson and hit that building."

She recalled being a young mother to sons Milo, now 29, and 24-year-old Owen, whose father is Lake's ex-husband Rob Sussman.

"I had a 2-month-old and a 4-year-old. I was a lactating new mother protecting my cubs. I just felt like the world was coming to an end that day, and I had an epiphany on the roof of my building, as I watched it all unfold, that I would leave New York, that I would leave my job, and I would leave, ultimately, my marriage," Lake explained. "And it took a lot of planning, it took a couple of years to finish my contract — I couldn't walk away from my show — but I knew I wasn't going to renew beyond that, the term that I had agreed to."

She eventually relocated to California and began "making documentary films and being more behind the scenes."

Maury Povich and Ricki LakeCredit: Jim Spellman/WireImage; Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty

Lake added, "I felt like, though the show was a phenomenon, and I think we did so much good for young people, to get conversations going for people who were marginalized and not represented to be seen on television. I think there's a lot of good that came out of our show, but, for me personally, I was like an actor for hire in a lot of ways. My producers did the whole thing. I didn't have a voice, really."

Since she left daytime TV, Lake has executive-produced projects including the 2008 doc The Business of Being Born and 2021's The Business of Birth Control. She's also acted in TV series such as Drop Dead Diva and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

See her full discussion with Povich above.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”