Phil McGraw, controversial TV personality and psychologist known as “Dr. Phil,” plans to end its long-running show in the coming months, according to a statement released by CBS Media Ventures.
The daytime show has been running for 21 years.
“With this show, we’ve helped thousands of guests and millions of viewers with everything from addiction and marriage to mental wellness and education,” McGraw said in the statement. “This has been an incredible chapter in my life and career, but as I go from day to day, there are so many things I want to do.”
According to the statement, McGraw chose to leave the series to pursue other ventures, including prime-time programming. “Dr. Phil” was renewed in 2018 through 2023 and will continue to air new episodes for the remainder of the current season and will not be renewed.
McGraw, whose daytime television career spans more than 25 years, first made his mark as a frequent guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the 1990s. “Phil” premiered in 2002 and took first or the second such place in the last two decades. The syndicated daytime show has received 31 Emmy nominations and won five PRISM Awards.
“Dr. Phil’s talk show, where guests talk about mental health and other life issues and receive advice, has been applauded for opening up conversations about therapy and mental health. But both McGraw and his show have received criticism over the years. Despite attracting over 2 million viewers, the show was called out for exploiting people with mental illness for the sake of entertainment.
In 2016, a teenage guest on the show who was deemed “out of control” by her mother went viral when she said “Let go, how about this” while trying to fight the audience. Another woman, who claimed she was pregnant with baby Jesus and that Eminem was the father, appeared on the show several times.
The show also faced legal problems. According to The Washington Post, a Colorado woman appeared on the talk show in 2019 and was sent to a farm for troubled teens in Utah, where she was allegedly sexually assaulted by an employee. In 2021, she sued McGraw and ViacomCBS, alleging that her family was forced to send her to the program but was not notified that previous participants had accused employees of misconduct.
In 2020, McGraw came under fire for a tweet he posted and then deleted about sexual assault. “If a girl is drunk, is it okay to have sex with her? Answer yes or no to @drphil,” the tweet reads, with the hashtag #teenssccused. The show defended the tweet in a statement, saying it intended to “bring the discussion to a very serious show business topic based on a recent news story, hence the hashtag #teensaccused,” adding that the question was a poll, rather than a declaration. .or a joke. .
A BuzzFeed News investigation last year also revealed that current and former employees said they experienced “verbal abuse in the workplace that encourages fear, intimidation and racism.”
McGraw also faced scrutiny over comments he made about COVID-19 during a 2020 Fox News interview that featured him and a top member of the House coronavirus task force White, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Two hundred and fifty people die every year because of poverty, and the poverty line is becoming so that more and more people will fall below it because the economy is collapsing around us,” McGraw said. “And I’m doing it because people are dying from the coronavirus. I understand.”
He continued: “But look, the thing is, we have people dying: 45,000 people die a year from car accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we’re not shutting down the country because of it. . But are we still doing it for that? And the consequences will last for years as people’s lives are destroyed.”
