Remember successfully convincing your mother that you were too sick to go to school? Whether you actually had a cold or you held a thermometer to the light, a sick day from school meant you were about to witness the best television that major networks could offer between the hours of 9 and 4.

Daytime TV exploded with wildness in the 80s and 90s, kept the outrageousness alive in the early 2000s, and has still been simmering on up to today. From Geraldo Rivera and Jenny Jones to Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, producers of these shows concocted a mixture of having the weirdest people on the show for even wilder reasons.

If you weren’t confronting your cheating partner, then people went on the show to save their “satanic” child who just started listening to Metallica. And then there were the people taking their baby daddy to a known genetic DNA specialist, Maury, to have a calm and respectful conversation about co-parenting (which included running like track stars).

We all remember spending a sick day parked in front of the TV to feel better about our normal, non-traumatic lives comparatively. So to celebrate the wonderfully weird world of daytime TV content, down below is a bounty of out-there screengrabs from a medley of daytime talk and court shows. Get ready to start chanting “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!”