Phil McGraw announced on Tuesday that he was ending the 21-year-old daytime television broadcast of “Dr. Phil” in the spring.
The talk and advice show will cease airing after the end of the current season, according to CBS Media Ventures, the content creator associated with the CBS network under the Paramount Global conglomerate.
McGraw, 72, plans to announce a “primetime partnership” that will launch in 2024, CBS Media Ventures said in a statement.
“It’s been an incredible chapter in my life and career,” McGraw said in the statement, “but as I go through the day, there’s so much more I want to do.”
The transition keeps him in the CBS family.
“Although his show is ending after 21 years, I’m happy to say our relationship is not,” Steve LoCascio, president of CBS Media Ventures, said in the statement.
The company plans to continue offering reruns of the show, which may include new intros, for the season after its last airing.
“We plan to be in the ‘Dr. Phil’ business with the library for years to come and welcome opportunities to work together in the future,” LoCascio said.
McGraw was once a licensed psychologist in Texas before moving to California to start “Dr. Phil.” McGraw’s advice went on to help create an industry that later welcomed another TV doctor, Mehmet Oz, to the airwaves.
He began his entertainment career as an American life coach on Oprah Winfrey’s show in the 1990s.
Before her television debut, McGraw met Winfrey in 1996 when she hired him to help and advise her in a defamation case with the beef industry. “It was there that she learned her direct approach to life coaching,” according to the Oprah site.
In 2004, two years after the show was launched by Winfrey’s production company, McGraw was criticized for appearing to offer help to Americans while providing disclaimers that the show was for entertainment purposes. , and not for the purpose of professional advice or therapy.
At the time, it included a disclaimer that said material offered in the program was “not necessarily created or endorsed by a certified mental health professional.”
Sociologist Julie Albright, a family therapy expert at the University of Southern California, said in 2008, “It’s hard to do therapy or intervention in half an hour or an hour.”
The question of whether the show was for entertainment or popular therapy made headlines in 2008 when McGraw visited Britney Spears’ hospital room in Los Angeles, where she was being evaluated after her embroiled in a confrontation with the authorities over a custody dispute over her two toddlers.
At the time, Spears also had a series of high-profile incidents, including shaving her head and attacking a vehicle with an umbrella.
In reaction to criticism that he was trying to insert himself into the story for entertainment value, McGraw canceled a planned show about the pop star’s situation. He said in a statement released at the time that the show was to focus on Spears’ pre-hospitalization situation and that he visited the hospital at the request of his parents.
As “Dr. Phil” sought to distance himself from the idea that he would ever give medical advice or psychological therapy, McGraw on Tuesday embraced the idea that his legacy is about helping everyday viewers heal and to evolve.
“With this show,” he said in the CBS Media Ventures statement, “we’ve helped thousands of guests and millions of viewers through everything from addiction and marriage to mental wellness and to the education of children”.
Josh Cradduck contributed.