Maury Povich Says That He, Too, Watches 'Maury' Reruns Because He Never Remembers Who the Father Is (2025)

• Maury Povich spoke to wife Connie Chung on the first episode of his new podcast, On Par with Maury Povich
• In the episode, Chung asked her husband if he's happy he ended his talk show Maury back in 2022
• Povich confirmed that he is — but that it doesn't feel like it ended since it's still on TV. He also explained why he often ends up watching old episodes

It’s been a perpetual habit of TV viewers everywhere for more than 30 years: flipping through the channels and catching parts of an episode of Maury. But now host Maury Povich is admitting he’s one of those people, too.

Povich, 86, opened up about rewatching episodes of his show on the first episode of his On Par with Maury Povich podcast, released March 31. His wife Connie Chung was his first guest.

During the episode, Chung, 78, asked her husband if he was okay with retiring from Maury. The show ran from 1991 to 2022, when Povich retired, for a whopping 5,545 episodes. Many of the episodes featured a mother seeking a paternity test to determine who the father of the child was. When Povich would read out the results, he’d ironically intone, ”You are the father” or “You are not the father.”

Povich confirmed that he was glad he retired, but joked with his wife, “That was two years ago. Don’t you think you could've asked me earlier?” “Well, you didn't have a podcast,” Chung said with a laugh.

“I'm happy that the show ended,” Povich said. “It ended at the right time, because it’s not really over. Because if I turn on the TV, every single day, there's the show. “

“And sometimes, I watch because I can't remember that segment,” Povich added, laughing.

“You want find out who the baby daddy is,” Chung said. “Yeah,” Povich confirmed, “just like everybody else.”

Chung said that she doesn’t like when she sees videos of the show on social media and the stories are split into segments. “They stop the story before we find out who the baby daddy is,” she said.

“That's part one. There's a part two,” Povich said. “You just gotta wait for that. That's the kicker. It’s the tease.”

Maury was the longest-running daytime talk show with one host in American history.

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"A lot of the guests came on the show because they felt they could relieve their burden," Povich told PEOPLE about starting his podcast. "They felt that they could create a safe space with me and that I was a good person to talk to, and it was almost like I was a member of their family. I didn't have the opportunity to talk about myself and my feelings and my experiences."

But before Povich started Maury, he worked for years as a broadcast journalist, eventually hosting the show A Current Affair.

"For the past 30-plus years, everybody has thought of me as a kind of a talk show host who [discusses] certain themes," he said. "That was a great career and I love the storytelling, and I think that I was able to do it successfully because of my earlier career as a journalist and a storyteller when it came to news, and rather traditional talk shows that I did."

Povich married Chung, whom he met when they were both working journalists in Washington, D.C., in 1984. They share son Matthew Povich. He also has two daughters, Susan and Amy, from his first marriage. Chung published a memoir, Connie, in 2024.