SCOOP: MAURY POVICH GOES UPSCALE

My sources are telling me the "Maury Povich Show" is wrapping up production at it's studios inside the Hotel Pennsylvania, across the street from Penn Station in Manhattan. They've been there for about four years now, but in a cost cutting move, the show is packing up its bags and moving into a newly redesigned facility in, ready, Stanford, Connecticut.



They'll share studios with several other syndicated shows. I'm not sure if any of you have taken notice of the audience that Maury packs into his midtown studio, but they're quite frightening. They're generally inner city kids who are broke. They go there for the cheap thrill and the free pizza. Every day they film, producers order up pizza's from a local joint and deliver them to the studio, the former grand ballroom of the hotel.



In the middle of the day, you can spot the young rebels hanging outside the Hotel on 33rd street. You got your sassy black girls, ghetto looking Latinos boys and transgendered folk all milling about on the street during the shows lunch break.

I'm trying to envision the type of audience they'll get in Stanford. In this city of 120,000, 70% of the population is white, 15% black and nearly 17% Latino. Maury's New York show is packed with the ruff neck type from the inner city, which will be hard to round up in Stanford, where the average annual income is $60,500.



I'm guessing they'll bus the kids in from New York. At 70, you'd think this guy would just give it up and move on, but no, his show continues, focusing on such fringe topics as "girls on meth gone while," "teens under 12 who beat up their teachers," and that sort of thing. The topics match the studio audience, but with the demographics changing maybe we'll see, "How I spent my 401K on drugs," and
"Bernie Madoff: The early years."