Key Points
Susan Powter has slammed her ’90s talk show in an interview with EW.
The fitness icon fronted The Susan Powter Show after her Stop the Insanity! fame.
Powter recently starred in the documentary Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter.
’90s infomercial icon Susan Powter tells Entertainment Weekly she only ever wanted to use her platform to spread vital knowledge on food and wellness — and, in hindsight, her short-lived, nationally televised talk show wasn’t a healthy place for her to do it.
In an exclusive interview inside one of her favorite restaurants in Las Vegas — where she’s lived for decades after losing her fortune due to bad business deals and what she calls a shady management team around her — Powter reflects on how she went from being a pop culture fixture of a bygone era to an Uber Eats driver who currently makes ends meet delivering meals throughout the Nevada city.
After hitting it big with her 1992 infomercial Stop the Insanity! (which was even parodied at the time by Kirstie Alley on Saturday Night Live), Powter went from being a Texas mother with a passion for wellness to a nationally renowned fitness expert.
She describes her overnight success by saying Stop the Insanity! “blew the s— up,” leading to book deals, exercise videos, weight loss guides, VHS shopping guides, an interview on The Tonight Show, and even a guest role on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air opposite Will Smith.
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Susan Powter on ‘The Susan Powter Show’ talk show
But, after Powter reached perhaps the pinnacle of success with her syndicated daytime talk series, The Susan Powter Show, she admits the project made her realize that life in the spotlight wasn’t what she was after in the first place.
“I did that horrifying show for the length of my contract,” Powter remembers. “I said, ‘I hate it, I hate the show. It has nothing to do with me, I’ve done it,'” before telling those around her that she wanted out of the show altogether before it ended its single-season run in 1995.
Powter goes on to call the men behind the scenes “prehistoric” — specifically, a trio of unnamed producers (according to IMDb, the show had four producers, and only one was a man).
Still, Powter calls the team “white men” who “had no idea about women’s anything,” despite the show featuring segments aimed at women’s interests. She even alleges that one unnamed staffer “grabbed everyone’s a– that walked by,” calling the environment a “gross” one to work in.
Clips from the program are still available online in a limited capacity, with one segment on YouTube showing a jovial Powter sharing a recipe for low-fat fried chicken.
In her 2025 documentary, Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter, the 68-year-old reflects on some of the cloying segments she was asked to do on the show. During a portion of the film that takes place in Powter’s apartment, the camera shows her rummaging through some of her old possessions, including VHS recordings of The Susan Powter Show — particularly an episode titled “How to Meet a Man.”
“I’d like to see the segment, because I’d never do a segment like that. I’d never talk about that. I don’t care if you meet a man, and I don’t think most women should meet a man,” Powter, who came out as a lesbian after her rise to fame, tells the documentary crew.
The film then plays footage from the talk show, including Powter telling her audience, “There’s so many ways to meet a man, but what’s the best way?” before another clip sees her asking the studio crowd, “If you don’t want to go and do whatever you had to do in the past in the ’80s, like go to a disco and listen to Donna Summer all night — although I love Donna Summer, I love her — but, if you’re not willing to do that, how do you meet a man in the ’90s?”
Back in her apartment in the present day, Powter asks the camera, “You want my opinion on it now? Lesbian, all the way!”
Later in her interview with EW, Powter says she “never walked away from anything” in her life before exiting the talk show, and “of course” she tried to fix the program “with every production meeting” she could before deciding to leave.
“It was my f—ing show. There wasn’t a segment on that show I didn’t hate,” she explains. “I did it, and I did a good job” while in the middle of “doing a lot of other things — I wasn’t just doing that.”
Elsewhere in her interview with EW, Powter says that the team around her also pressured her into taking on acting jobs that didn’t align with her wellness mission, namely the aforementioned Fresh Prince acting gig and a part on the ill-fated Designing Women spin-off Women of the House in 1995.
Susan Powter of ‘Stop the Insanity!’ infomercial fame
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She also claims Kevin Costner called her to offer her a villainous role in his 1995 action film Waterworld, but she declined, much to the chagrin of her manager at the time.
“My manager was livid because she wanted the movie,” Powter says. “[She thought] it would’ve been a great thing for me,” adding that, at this point, she realized that some members of her team wanted to push her away from her core principles of health and wellness and into the vein of hollow, cash-grabbing celebrity.
Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter — produced by Jamie Lee Curtis — is now available on digital platforms.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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