Not long ago, Dr. Phil McGraw made headlines not for his trademark brand of straight-talking psychology but for his bold return to television. After ending his long-running daytime show in 2023, the North Texas native launched his own Fort Worth-based network, Merit Street Media — a high-stakes venture that promised to blend the punch of traditional TV with a fresh slate of original programming. It was, at least on paper, an ambitious move.
A little more than a year later, the network is in bankruptcy court, Dr. Phil’s prime-time comeback is on ice, and what began as a glitzy new media empire has morphed into a bitter legal brawl with the largest Christian broadcasting company in the world.
Merit Street filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 2, claiming financial collapse and alleging in a scathing lawsuit that its business partner — Trinity Broadcasting Network, better known as TBN — not only failed to deliver on its promises, but actively sabotaged the new network from within.
“Simply put, as a result of TBN’s conduct, Merit Street has nowhere to send its broadcast signal and nowhere to air its programming, no matter how great it may be,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit, filed alongside the Chapter 11 petition, outlines a tangled story of botched production, broken deals, and more than $100 million in alleged liabilities. Merit Street says the dysfunction began almost immediately after the network's formation in early 2023, when Dr. Phil’s Peteski Productions partnered with TBN under the premise that the Christian network would provide both national distribution and top-tier production services.
Instead, according to Merit Street, what it got was a circus. Teleprompters blacked out mid-show. Control rooms operated out of trucks. Touchscreens used for video editing barely functioned. Even the studio’s cell coverage was so poor that producers couldn’t place phone calls inside the building. The complaint calls TBN’s setup “comically dysfunctional,” a sharp contrast to the polished, CBS-backed environment Dr. Phil had grown used to in Los Angeles.
And it wasn’t just the production woes. According to the lawsuit, TBN withheld critical distribution payments — money that, by contract, the Christian broadcaster was solely responsible for providing. Without those funds, Merit Street claims it had no way to keep itself on the air. In one particularly pointed allegation, the company says it lost national distribution entirely because of TBN’s inaction.
The dominoes began falling quickly. In August 2024, just eight months after the network’s first broadcasts, 38 employees were laid off. Three months later, the network’s four-year deal with Professional Bull Riders unraveled after PBR accused Merit Street of missing contractual payments and walked away in a public social media post. By June 2025, another 40 employees were out of work, and the network's flagship program, “Dr. Phil Primetime,” was put on hiatus.
Behind the scenes, the financial web got even messier. The lawsuit alleges that TBN orchestrated a $25 million loan to Merit Street through a connected entity called CrossSeed, which was then passed to another affiliate, TCT — a move that the complaint claims is legally suspect and an “avoidable preference,” since the note’s transfer happened just weeks before the bankruptcy filing.
In the lawsuit, Merit Street argues that all of TBN’s and TCT’s claims as creditors should be “equitably subordinated” — legalese for saying they should go to the back of the line — due to what it calls TBN’s “gross misconduct.”
A spokesperson for Merit Street told Variety that the lawsuit was filed “as part of a restructuring proceeding” and said the suit aims to hold TBN accountable for “failing to provide clearly agreed-upon national distribution and other significant foundational commitments critical to the network’s continuing success and viability.”
TBN was founded in 1973 and is now run by Matthew Crouch, who is also named in the lawsuit.
The implosion of Merit Street Media is a sobering turn for McGraw, who earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of North Texas in 1979 and rose to fame thanks to regular appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” before launching “Dr. Phil” in 2002. At its peak, his syndicated talk show drew millions of viewers and ran for 21 seasons.
But even for a TV veteran, the transition from talent to network mogul was never going to be easy — especially not in today’s media landscape, where cable television is steadily losing ground to streaming giants and digital-first outlets. Launching a new national network in 2023 may have been bold. Doing it with a broadcast partner who allegedly couldn’t deliver on basic production needs may have been disastrous.
Now, McGraw’s vision for a Fort Worth-based media empire is tied up in bankruptcy court, with a long road of litigation, restructuring, and damage control ahead.
