STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning <br /><br />Six years ago, I wrote my first review of The Maury Povich Show (or Maury as it is now known) and the main thing I could think to write of it was 'sad.' It seemed like a sad show for sad people (and it's certainly still that) but I admitted certain things about it, like finding out whether guys had cheated or were the fathers of children or not, could be quite suspenseful. Just about the only positive high point of this collosally dreadful show.<br /><br />Amazingly, it's six years later and this nearly 70 year old man is still presenting a show that has obviously remained popular enough for the networks to keep broadcasting it. I stopped watching it quite some time ago (simply lost whatever small fleck of interest I had in it!) but recently I caught some new episodes while channel surfing. And it would appear it hasn't gone broke by appealing to the lowest common denominator.<br /><br />Aside from the reported name-change (from The Maury Povich Show to simply Maury) the tone of the show would appear to have also gone downhill. While it's always been a cynical and exploitative show, it used to at least try to show a sensitive, sentimental angle which at least went some way in giving it a tender, soft side. But the show has had to move with the hard, cynical times and now we have the same old tired scenarios ("You're my baby's daddy", "You cheated!") only done with harder, crueller guests (but you now have to wonder, with all the inside exposes they do on these types of shows, whether it's all just been how they're told to behave all along...they have to move with the times, after all) who just seem utterly militant and unable to hear anyone's point but their own. And the accused are no better, with their fast track opening skits, where they put their side of the argument across as cheaply and tackily as possible in dinghy black and white camera, doing such things as flashing their cash and sticking their butts in front of the camera (so their accuser can kiss it!), people without the slightest modicum of class or intelligence whatsoever who make your average guest on The Jeremy Kyle Show (a version of this show from the UK, where we actually have a class structure!) seem like Wordsworth! <br /><br />But what you cannot get over is simply how boring it is! Not only is it the same old topics over and over again, the 'guests' behave in the same way over and over again. How many times must we watch some loud mouth gangsta from the hood come stomping out to point at a huge camera projection of some infant and say how it can't be his 'cos his face don't look like mine!' only to be followed with the inevitable slanging match in front of millions with some promiscuous sort who he can't even remember sleeping with, which invariably requires the security staff to intervene. This is just one example of many of which it's too boring to bring up but, watch the show for yourself, and you'll get as bored with it as I do.<br /><br />This has gone from being a 'sad' show to a truly pathetic show and it says a lot about society that six years after my first review it's still going on and it will nearly have been on air for twenty years! Some people really need to get a life. *