The Jenny Jones Show
The makeover reveals, the secret crushes, the boot-camp teens and the audience groaning on cue. Jenny Jones ran in syndication from 1991 to 2003, and for a stretch in the mid-90s it was the second-highest-rated talk show in daytime, behind only Oprah.
Jenny Jones was born Janina Stronski in 1946 and raised in London, Ontario; she drummed in bands, sang in Las Vegas, and in 1986 became the first woman to win the comedy category on Star Search, which led to a nightclub act called Girls' Night Out. Warner Bros. built a daytime show around her, and The Jenny Jones Show premiered in syndication on September 16, 1991, taped at the NBC Tower in Chicago and launched on 178 stations, the largest launch a syndicated talk show had ever had. The first season was a conventional mix of cooking, fashion and celebrities, and the ratings were modest.
For its second season the show reformatted into a tabloid talk show: one topic per episode, ordinary guests airing their grievances, and an audience Jones treated as part of the cast. Makeovers and boot camp for misbehaving teenagers became its signature segments, live bands played during the reveals, and the ratings surged. In its fourth season it averaged a 4.5 rating, third among talk shows, and by December 1995 it was at 4.6, second only to The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Washington Post later credited it with popularizing paternity tests and makeovers across the genre.
The show is also remembered for a tragedy. On March 6, 1995 it taped an episode called "Revealing Same Sex Secret Crush," in which Scott Amedure, 32, revealed on stage that he had a crush on his neighbor Jonathan Schmitz, 24. Three days later Schmitz shot and killed Amedure at his home in Lake Orion, Michigan. Schmitz was convicted of second-degree murder; the episode was shelved and never ran as a regular broadcast (Court TV showed it in 1996 during trial coverage), and Amedure's family won a $25 million jury verdict in a negligence suit against the show that the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review. The show became a favored target of critics afterward, named the worst syndicated talk show of 1996 by the New York Daily News.
Jones kept it on the air for eight more seasons. The show broadcast more than 2,000 episodes across twelve seasons before the tabloid talk genre faded and it was canceled, with a finale on May 21, 2003. Jones has said since that she has no interest in returning to television, and she now runs a cooking channel instead.
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