The Steve Wilkos Show / YMMV

Broken Base: The show itself. There are those who praise it for tackling issues that aren't normally addressed and how Steve Wilkos deals with said issues. Others, however, have certain issues with the show and consider Wilkos to be a bully due to them thinking he's too much of a hardass on certain guests.
- There's also the debate as to whether the lie detector tests are credible as Steve Wilkos claims they are, especially with one documented instance in which the alleged abuse a mother inflicted on her child turned out to be ringworm and the emotional abuse heaped on her by Wilkos drove her to attempt suicide.
- One episode dealt with a father bringing on his ex-wife's gay friend accusing him of molesting his daughter. Steve didn't like the guy and refused to read the accusers' results because of that and because the guy called Steve instead of going to the police force. Here's the issue, mothers have legitimately said they called the show first before going to the police. He has called them out sometimes, but still read the results. It seems like he let his own dislike against the father cloud his judgement and, as comments pointed out, if the friend was doing it, Steve just gave him more reason to keep doing it!
Harsher in Hindsight: In a Season 6 episode titled "Did My Boyfriend Download Child Porn?", a guest named Damien, a former Marine, who was arrested on five counts of possession of child pornography – claimed that his computer was infected with an "FBI virus" that locked it up in exchange for extorting a $300 fine to avoid arrest, which led to his actual arrest after an employee at a computer repair store he took it to recovered deleted fragments of pornographic images of children that were on Damien's hard drive.

Though he did confess to Dan Ribacoff before the show that he had viewed and downloaded child porn, to the shock of his girlfriend, Caitlin, Damien's insistence that his computer caught the virus isn't implausible. A type of malware, known as "ransomware" is common on the Internet, and normally shows up on dodgy websites, created by Malware authors to make a quick buck. One particular ransomware named Cryptolocker was running wild at the time of the episode's initial airing in 2014.^note

Ironically, Wilkos's reasoning for Damien's guilt, him paying the fine, is what computer experts advise affected ransomware users to do, as well as have the malware uninstalled by a sufficiently skilled computer technician. Wilkos suggested that Damien only paid the fine due to an impulsive reaction and that any normal person wouldn't do the same, even though a good quantity of people hit by Cryptolocker "panic paid" the malware authors to gain access to their files. Three years later, a pair of especially prominent Ransomware programs named WannaCry and NotPetya spread across the globe, and as you can expect, many people panic-bought access to their files, showing that it's actually a very common if an impulsive reaction to immediately fork out cash in fear of losing your data. As such, while Wilkos's assumption of Damien's guilt is proven right, his deductive reasoning didn't take a "benefit of the doubt" approach that Damien may have told the truth about the ransomware since Wilkos didn't have any knowledge on the subject.
Memetic Badass:
- Wilkos will take away your chair. Even if it's not on his show.
- Dan always knows when you're lying or not.
Memetic Mutation:
- GET OFF MY STAGE!!
- GET OFF THE CHAIR; YOU AIN'T SITTING ON THE CHAIR!!
- The Too Dumb to Live guest who was caught lying on the lie detector test kept screaming "Whatever!" in a slurred voice each time Steve called him out.
Ron the Death Eater: Wilkos himself has gotten this treatment mainly from reviewers of the show, accusing him of being a bully to all his guests. What they completely overlook, however, is that Wilkos is often very friendly to his guests and is only verbally abusive to those who have been proven guilty of some horrible crime.
Unintentional Period Piece:
- Steve has a poor opinion of marijuana usage. In earlier episodes he often chastised guests who admitted to smoking it, hammering on the point that it's illegal and treating it as a form of deviant behavior. With marijuana now being legal for at least limited use in most of the United States and a lot of the stigma around it fading away, watching Steve chastise a guest for marijuana use and treating it as a sign that they're a deviant certainly dates these episodes as being from a different time.
- One guest admits to being hit with the infamous FBI MoneyPak ransomware.
The Woobie:
- The parents of a child victimized by a sexual predator or physical abuser, especially when the lie detector test uncovers that the person who abused them turns out to be a family member or friend they once trusted or was the accused parent who failed their test. Though attacking the perp in the heat of the moment may cause negative consequences for the parent seeking justice, the parent's angry reactions to finding out who hurt their kid are very understandable, as Wilkos sometimes acknowledges when talking them down from hurting the criminal and letting the criminal justice system prevail instead.
- Whenever a man breaks down in tears when he finds out he isn't the biological father of the child that he wanted to be his.
- People accused and later proven innocent of abusing a child sexually or physically who reveal prior to their exoneration that they were victims of abuse as well and have underwent various hardships. One such case was Tasha, a guest who appeared in a 2014 episode titled "I Did Not Murder My 4-Month-Old Son". She was involved in an abusive relationship with the biological father of her son, wound up having to drop out of college and quit her job because of her high-risk pregnancy, ended up living in a women's shelter, and became homeless when she was no longer able to pay rent because she was now unemployed, and her son wound up dying right in front of her when she accompanied him in the ambulance en route to the hospital. On top of it all, she was arrested on capital murder charges for the death of her 4-month-old son (whose funeral she wasn't even allowed to go to), but was released after autopsy results determined that he died of accidental automatic asphyxiation. This forced her to come on the show to clear her name, along with her current boyfriend, also named Steve, who is very supportive of her and also believes that she did not murder her son. Much to Tasha and her boyfriend's relief, the lie detector test exonerated her. Not only that, her boyfriend Steve proposed to her on-stage shortly after she passed the test.

YMMV / The Steve Wilkos Show

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