Media: February 2025 • 18 Seasons of Steve Wilkos
Steve Wilkos
It’s hard to believe, but Steve Wilkos is now in his 18th season as the host of The Steve Wilkos Show. The show airs in Chicago on WCIU-TV.
“18 seasons,” he says. “I wake up every morning, and I say the same thing. I still can’t believe it. I’ve been doing it, you know. I’ve been on TV for 31 straight years, and I still can’t believe it. I woke up from a dream the other day, and I told my wife, it’s so crazy what we do for a living. My dad was in the military and became a Chicago policeman. And, you know, he did it for 30 years and then retired and moved to Florida. And that’s what I was going to do. I joined the Marines. I became a Chicago policeman. I planned on doing it till I got my pension. I just got a weird break that changed my whole life.”
Wilkos’ big break came in 1994 when he was hired to do security for The Jerry Springer Show. He didn’t think much of it at the time.
“When I started the show, It was nothing. It was a blah, blah, blah talk show. And then then it, you know, it took the turn where it went confrontational. And then when it hit, oh boy, it hit.”
What was it like working in that mayhem?
“I was telling my kids this over the summer when we went to Italy. We were in Rome, and we saw the Roman Coliseum, and I told my kids that the Jerry Springer show was like the Roman Coliseum because people wanted to be fed. They were bloodthirsty, our audiences in Chicago, yeah. If there was no fight, everybody was disappointed. Our studio was a little bigger than the one I have now, and when things would go crazy and go up in the air, you couldn’t even hear the person next to you. That’s how loud that studio would get. I remember one time the producers were trying to get my attention. I was on the stage, and they were screaming at me, and I couldn’t hear them because of the crowd. That happened a lot. We would have guests like the Ku Klux Klan and those type of shows, and when we did, we also had people from the audience coming up and fighting the guests on the show. I mean, it was just, it was absolutely nuts.”
His own show is a little bit different than that, and it was a conscious decision to go a different route.
“I think my shows nothing like Jerry’s,” he says. “Jerry used to say all the time that it was the circus, and he was just the ringmaster. When I got my show, we could have gone the lazy, easy route and made it like another form of Jerry Springer. But my wife actually came up with the concept of this show. She said, ‘Listen, what are you good at? You’re a policeman, and you’re a really good policeman. We’re going to take the policeman off the streets of Chicago and put you on stage, and you’re going to deal with topics like that.’ We’ve done sexual assault, crimes, theft, murders, missing people. We’ve done all kinds of things. Now, admittedly, we’ll do a cheating story every now and then, and we’ll bring out the DNA experts. But where Jerry was kind of the funny uncle hosting a show. I’m the tough cop hosting a show. I thought that it was really important to do something totally different than Jerry so that people couldn’t say, Oh, you’re just doing the Jerry Springer show all over again.”
Another thing that has changed is his location. He now lives on the East Coast. That’s where The Steve Wilkos Show is taped.
“But I’m still Chicago through and through,” he says. “I mean, I was born and raised in Chicago. I grew up in Roscoe village. I went to Lane Tech High School. I’m from Chicago. When I was in the Marines, I’d meet other Marines, and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’m from Chicago too.’ Oh yeah, where? They’d say something like Kankakee. That’s not Chicago.”
Steve still comes back to his hometown every year. When we spoke, he was here helping WCIU hand out food to the underprivileged. He also came back to town last May and fulfilled a lifelong dream. He got to throw out the first pitch at a Cubs game.
“May 16,” he says, remembering the exact day. “That was another one of the highlights of my life. I grew up right down the street from Wrigley Field. I used to flip up seats after the game when I was a kid because they would give kids passes to future games if we did that. And so that was my childhood. I remember the first day of taping on my current show, my wife gave me a present. She gave me wooden cufflinks that were made out of old seats from Wrigley. And she said, ‘You’ve come a long way from flipping seats at Wrigley Field.’ It was a really nice moment, but this was even better. From flipping seats to throwing out the first pitch. Man. I never thought that was going to happen.”
The Steve Wilkos Show airs weekdays in Chicago at 10 am on the U.
-Rick Kaempfer
