It was not a good day for Dr. Phil.
Phillip McGraw, the genial celebrity psychologist who spent a career calling out the behavior of others and doling out zingers, found himself upbraided by a bankruptcy judge.
Merit Street Media, McGraw’s new network, had filed for bankruptcy protection in July, a little more than a year after he launched the media startup, and then sued its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network.
During a nearly three-hour hearing in Dallas last month, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Scott Everett said that he’d “never seen a case” like the Chapter 11 filing McGraw’s company was attempting.
Everett cited evidence indicating McGraw had “violated” a court order by deleting “unflattering” text messages that allegedly described his plan to use the bankruptcy to “wipe out” creditor claims.
“What makes this case unique, unfortunately, is that it has been plagued with the attempted destruction of relevant evidence and less than truthful testimony by some of the key players,” said Everett, alluding to McGraw and his associates in the case.
Everett ruled that Merit Street be liquidated.
Following the hearing, a spokesperson for McGraw’s production company vigorously denied the accusation that he destroyed evidence and said he is appealing the ruling.
“Dr. McGraw’s excellent record of integrity, success and service to millions over two decades speaks for itself,” said Chip Babcock, attorney for McGraw’s production company.
The unraveling of McGraw’s media venture was a gut punch for the celebrity therapist who has assiduously built a reputation — and tremendous personal wealth — as one of the most trusted voices on television. But his fortunes faded amid a dying market for syndicated TV and clashes with a distributor and partner.
After 21 years as host of the successful syndicated talk show “Dr. Phil,” McGraw went out on his own last year. He launched Merit Street Media in Texas, a company that he said would promote “family values” and serve as an antidote to “woke” culture, only to find that his ambitions collided with a new television reality.
Unlike “Dr. Phil,” Merit Street was untethered to the well-oiled machine of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, where it was filmed, and top tier distribution partner CBS.
Moreover, the sheer force of McGraw’s personality could not overcome the fact that linear TV is on the wane. Syndicated daytime TV shows are no longer the cash cows they used to be as most viewers consume content through streaming and other digital outlets such as YouTube and TikTok.
“By the time he put this new company together, the ‘Dr. Phil’ era had kind of ended,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “There is a shelf life to these characters and he reached his.”
An Oprah favorite
McGraw rose from clinical psychologist to an American living room staple and self-help guru in the late 1990s after Oprah Winfrey anointed him as her protégé.
Television’s then-reigning queen hired McGraw to prepare for her libel case brought by Texas cattlemen in 1997. They claimed her comments during an episode about mad cow disease disparaged them and caused beef prices to drop.
Winfrey prevailed, but it was McGraw, a former linebacker with the commanding presence of a sheriff from an old-time western, who emerged victorious.
Much like books, pajama sets and certain chocolate brands, McGraw became one of Oprah’s favorite things. Recast as “Dr. Phil,” she featured him during weekly segments on her hugely popular talk show, starting in 1998. By 2002, a “Dr. Phil” spinoff began airing five days a week, produced by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions.
The show was distributed by CBS Media Ventures and filmed on a soundstage at Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue with a live audience, and it became the de facto voice for home viewers.
McGraw quickly earned a massive following for dispensing advice to cheating spouses, drug addicts, troubled teens, meddling in-laws, infamous criminals and celebrities. He delivered his no-nonsense, often blunt assessments wrapped in folksy Southern sayings such as “No matter how flat you make a pancake, it’s still got two sides.”
For more than two decades, “Dr. Phil” was a top rated syndicated daytime talk show — 11 of those seasons at No. 1 — garnering 31 daytime Emmy nominations. He was catapulted to stardom, appearing everywhere from late-night talk shows to sitcom cameos, even a character on Sesame Street, Dr. Feel. In 2020, he received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
McGraw leveraged “Dr. Phil” as a launching pad for his ever-growing empire of bestselling books and various ancillary businesses, including a virtual addiction recovery program, a telemedicine app and production company Stage 29 with his son Jay McGraw that produced shows like daytime’s “The Doctors.”
But as McGraw’s popularity and influence grew, so did the controversies.
The family of Britney Spears criticized him after he visited the troubled pop star when she was hospitalized on a psychiatric hold and issued a news release saying she was “in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention.”
A spokesperson for the Spears family said, “Rather than helping the family’s situation, the celebrity psychologist caused additional damage.”
McGraw later told viewers on his show that “I definitely think if I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t make any statement at all. Period.”
Claims of conflict
Questions were also raised that McGraw used his show to promote businesses and products connected to his family and affiliates, sometimes without fully disclosing those ties.
In 2006, McGraw settled a lawsuit for $10.5 million with consumers who alleged that he defrauded them by making false claims about a line of nutritional and weight loss supplements that he endorsed on “Dr. Phil.”
He faced a Federal Trade Commission investigation into false advertising and the line was eventually discontinued.
McGraw denied the allegations and did not admit to wrongdoing or misrepresentation in the settlement.
“Dr. McGraw’s career stands among the most successful in television history,” Babcock said. “His programs always have been completely transparent, with all brand integrations under full network oversight and full FCC compliance.”
The on-air promotion of McGraw’s family businesses, such as his wife Robin McGraw’s skincare line and lifestyle brand and his son Jay McGraw’s books during “integrations,” also drew scrutiny.
“Dr. Phil” episodes frequently featured guests suffering from addiction who were often offered the opportunity to check into a treatment facility at the end of the episode.
In 2017, an investigation by STAT News and the Boston Globe alleged that the show highlighted specific treatment facilities in exchange for those recovery programs purchasing various products affiliated with McGraw.
A spokesman for the show had denied the allegations, saying that “any suggestion that appearances on Dr. Phil’s show are linked to the purchase or use of this program is false.”
McGraw’s wattage remained undimmed. He continued to branch into new ventures. He launched a podcast in 2019, “Phil in the Blanks,” and prime-time TV shows like “Bull,” a legal drama on CBS based on his experiences as a trial strategist, and another CBS legal drama, “Help Me Todd.”
The “Dr. Phil” show has said that since its debut, it has provided $35 million in resources to its guests after they appeared.
During the last years of “Dr. Phil,” staffers and viewers noticed that programming began to shift away from advising relationships, parenting and money issues to more conservative and cultural issues such as immigration and transgender athletes.
“He took a political slant already, but once COVID hit, [the show] skewed more and more political,” said one former longtime “Dr. Phil” staffer who declined to be named out of fear of retaliation.
During an appearance on Fox News in April 2020, McGraw said that pandemic lockdowns would be more fatal than the virus, drawing a widespread backlash on social media.
McGraw later posted a video saying he supported CDC guidelines but was concerned about the mental health effects of long-term quarantine.
“He was very good about getting big stories, but we had no input, and believe me, if we ever wanted to or tried, we’d be just told ‘no,’” said a former executive at CBS, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.
Starting over in Texas
In 2023, McGraw announced that he was leaving CBS and returning to Texas to launch a new venture and broaden his audience, citing “grave concerns for the American family” and that he was “determined to help restore a clarity of purpose as well as our core values.”
Merit Street built a studio in a former AT&T call center in Fort Worth. Many of the staffers were veterans of “Dr. Phil” or had worked on McGraw-related content and relocated from Los Angeles to Texas.
The network, whose name was derived from meritocracy (with shades of main street), premiered in April 2024.
“Merit Street Media will be a resource of information and strategies to fight for America and its families, which are under a cultural ‘woke’ assault as never before,” McGraw said in a statement.
McGraw aired “exclusive” interviews with Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his flagship, “Dr. Phil Primetime.”
Programming consisted of a slate of news, entertainment and conservative commentary programs with former syndicated television stars Nancy Grace and Steve Harvey, whose Steve Harvey Global had a 5% stake in the company, according to Merit’s bankruptcy filings.
In January, McGraw made headlines when he taped interviews with Trump’s top border policy advisor Tom Homan during controversial immigration raids by ICE agents in Los Angeles.
But Merit struggled to find an audience; only 27,000 viewers tuned into the network weekly during 2024, placing it at 130 out of 153 U.S. channels, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“It’s totally false to say Merit had bad ratings,” Babcock said. “For a startup, it was like a rocket ship; at one point it passed CNN in the first few months of its existence.”
Merit soon scrapped the live audience for “Dr. Phil Primetime” and eventually production on its original programming came to a halt.
Four months after the network’s debut, the company cut 30% of its staff, including workers who had relocated from Los Angeles.
Facing mounting debts, Merit filed for bankruptcy protection in July, listing liabilities of at least $100 million.
“You could see the writing on the wall,” said the former CBS executive. “Ratings for syndication were dropping.”
While still a household name, McGraw was part of a waning breed of TV syndication stars — Judge Judy, Maury Povich and Ellen DeGeneres among them — whose shows were fast becoming nostalgic relics.
Former McGraw staffers from his CBS days said it appeared that he thought he could simply translate his name recognition and longtime popularity to the new venture, but failed to grasp the new digital media landscape.
“The programming model that he launched in 2024 was more appropriate two decades earlier,” said Syracuse University’s Thompson.
Merit Street faced internal strife as well, according to former staffers and court filings.
Former employees described tensions between Los Angeles transplants and less experienced nonunion crews.
“It was total disorganization,” said one former field producer who had worked for the “Dr. Phil” show and then relocated to Texas to work for Merit Street, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. “Everyone kept saying this was a startup, and maybe it was. People made decisions but had no idea what they were doing,” the producer added.
A representative of McGraw’s production company conceded the startup had growing pains.
“The company thought they could produce the same quality production with less people,” he said.
Compounding matters, relations between Merit and its business and broadcast partner TBN also soured.
Merit alleged in its lawsuit that TBN provided “comically dysfunctional” technical services, with teleprompters and monitors blacked out during live programs before a studio audience.
The suit further alleged that TBN failed to pay TV distributors and had reneged on its promise to cover $100 million in production services and other costs.
McGraw, through his production company, bankrolled the struggling enterprise from December 2024 to May 2025, lending it $25 million, according to Merit’s lawsuit.
For its part, TBN accused McGraw and his production company Peteski Productions of “fraudulent inducement,” alleging in a countersuit that it had invested $100 million into Merit and that McGraw and Peteski had failed to bring in promised advertising revenue.
TBN said McGraw reached out to the company as a potential replacement for CBS as a distribution partner during the latter half of 2022.
“McGraw specifically represented to TBN that he wanted to change networks because of what he perceived to be CBS’s censorship of the content aired on the ‘Dr. Phil Show.’ As McGraw put it, ‘I don’t want snot-nose lawyers telling me what I can and can’t say on TV,’” the lawsuit states.
Instead, they claimed in their complaint, McGraw and his company engaged in a “fraudulent scheme” to fleece TBN, a not-for-profit corporation.
In a statement to Variety, a spokesperson for McGraw and his production company called TBN’s lawsuit “riddled with provable lies.”
TBN did not respond to a request for comment.
Merit also clashed with another partner: Professional Bull Riders, which in November 2024 canceled its four-year contract with Merit and pulled its content, claiming the company had failed to pay the fees it owed.
PBR, which later signed with Fox Nation and CBS, alleged in a separate lawsuit that Merit breached their contract and is seeking $181 million.
“We’re glad he’s being held accountable,” said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, parent company of PBR, in a statement to The Times.
“Merit Street agreed to work out its differences with PBR in a confidential proceeding which is ongoing. We were therefore surprised that PBR would publicly accuse us of violating our agreement when the facts are in dispute,” the company said in an earlier statement.
Two weeks after Merit filed for bankruptcy, McGraw announced the launch of another new network, Envoy Media Co., that would include live, “balanced news,” original entertainment programming and “immersive viewer experiences,” as well as original programming from friend and former Merit stakeholder Steve Harvey.
Last month, Envoy struck a distribution deal with Charter Communications.
“Dr. McGraw remains deeply proud of his past work and the millions of people it has reached. He’s now turning that same purpose and energy toward Envoy Media,” Babcock said.
But the Merit legal drama is far from over.
TBN has since alleged that Merit Street filed for bankruptcy in bad faith as a way to secure funding for Envoy.
A spokesperson for Peteski called TBN’s allegation “blatantly false” and said Envoy is independently financed.
Earlier this month, Judge Everett rejected Merit’s motion to pause the company’s liquidation while his ruling is appealed. He cited deleted texts in which McGraw described plans by Merit to file for bankruptcy protection to “wipe out” debts from its main creditors, TBN and PBR.
“Candor to the court is critical,” said Everett during his original ruling, and then declared that Merit Street Media “was as dead as a door nail when the bankruptcy was filed.”
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