TV

There’s no quitting for these TV workaholics

You might think that the people you see on TV each day are living on easy street — assistants (slaves) catering all their meals, picking their outfits, setting their travel schedules and shuttling them around everywhere they go.

The truth is that TV stars do live well, but they’re also earning every minute of it. And many of them have the same fears and drives that most people do: fear of being unemployed, fear that it will all disappear at any moment and fear of suddenly being left empty-handed.

That explains why people like Steve Harvey, Mario Lopez, Jerry Springer, and Meredith Vieira keep so many irons in the fire.

Meredith Vieira (right) decided to host “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” when her contract with “The View” was up.Heidi Gutman/Disney-ABC

Steve Harvey, 56, currently has three jobs — each of which almost anyone else would consider a full-time gig. Harvey stars on his own daytime talk show, “The Steve Harvey Show,” which airs on Ch. 4 in New York. He hosts syndicated game show, “Family Feud,” which under his watch has soared to new ratings highs. He deejays “The Steve Harvey Morning Show,” a nationally syndicated morning radio show. And have we mentioned that he’s the best-selling author of several books, including “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” and “Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep and Understand a Man?”

Doing all of it isn’t easy, but Harvey said “fear of poverty” is what keeps him motivated.

“I don’t like it when people feel like they can control me with the threat of cancellation,” he says. “My form of job security is to have a lot of things going so that if one thing ends, I always have something else.”

Harvey starts his days in Chicago at 4:15 a.m., doing his radio show live for four hours five days a week. Once the radio show ends, he spends 20 minutes meditating. “I shut it all down and sit in a big chair behind these curtains. Then I go back out refreshed and ready to go.”

After that, on most weekdays from September through April, he tapes several episodes of his talk show. In the summers, he returns to Atlanta, where he still does the radio show, but goes on “Family Feud,” which shoots five or six episodes per day to stockpile them for the coming season.

“I happen to care about every minute of the day,” he says. “When you pay attention to every minute of the day, you can get a lot done. When I’m on the air in the morning, I’m actually shaving. When I’m in my make-up chair, I answer my calls, texts and e-mails. It’s very challenging but very rewarding at the same time,” he says.

Jerry Springer will host “Tabloid,” a new prime-time show in January.

Mario Lopez also is a man with many jobs. Like Harvey, he hosts both TV and radio programs. Each evening, he co-anchors “Extra” with Maria Menounos. He has a syndicated radio program, “On With Mario,” that airs four hours a day, five days a week, in more than 30 US markets. And in the fall, he’s front and center as host of Fox’s prime-time variety show, “The X Factor.”

Lopez also provides color commentary on HBO’s international boxing broadcasts and voices the main character on PBS Sprout’s animated show, “The Chica Show.” For the Latino network NuvoTV, he does an interview program called “One on One with Mario Lopez.”

None of it seems to faze Lopez, 40 and a married father of two. “I’ve never been happier professionally or personally,” he says. “I want more kids and I want more jobs.”

“I’ve always been an ambitious guy with a hustler mentality,” says the former teen star of “Saved by the Bell.” “Even as a kid growing up in this business, I knew everything was a temp job. So I approach everything with guarded optimism, wanting to do as much as I can.”

Most people think of Jerry Springer as just the guy who hosts that talk show in which people hurl chairs at each other, but Springer is actually one of the business’ hardest-working performers.

He’s been running interference on “The Jerry Springer Show” since 1991, but in the meantime, he’s kept himself busy doing other things as well. Most recently, he’s touring the country as host of “The Price Is Right Live.” He’s also hosting a weekly prime-time show, “Tabloid,” which will premiere this January on Thursdays at 10 p.m. on Investigation Discovery.

“Unlike movies, when you are on television, you are in people’s homes every day,” he says. “You become part of the furniture. People feel like they really know you.”

Springer, 69, still seems surprised that all of this has come about.

“I have this incredibly wonderful life that I honestly don’t know how I got,” he says. “I think I’m a nice guy and I’m reasonably bright, but you wouldn’t pick me out of a lineup and say, ‘This guy is going to be in show business.’ I’ve gotten lucky. Why would I want to stop doing it?”

A Mario of all trades: Lopez on Fox’s “The X Factor.”Michael Becker/FOX

Meredith Vieira, 59, knows the value of working hard and when it’s time to take a break. She’s preparing to launch her new talk show next fall, while serving as a special correspondent to NBC News and hosting “Lives with Meredith Vieira,” her own YouTube Channel.

“People who like me say it’s about authenticity,” she says, when asked why she’s had so many opportunities. “There are plenty of people on television who are playing themselves, but if you met them off camera they are really quite different. But people are smart; they can see through phoniness. TV is intimate. Folks who are watching you every day tend to see you as family.”

Vieira hopes to tap into that authenticity on her new talk show, but she’s got plenty of experience being herself in front of a camera.

From 2006-2011, she was co-anchor of NBC’s “Today.” While on “Today,” she also hosted “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” a job she held from 2002-13. Prior to “Today,” she was co-host of ABC’s “The View” and before that she served as a correspondent on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

“I started this two-job craziness back when I was doing ‘The View,’” she says. “[Executive producer] Michael Davies asked me if I wanted to host ‘Millionaire.’ It was the end of my contract with ‘The View’ and I thought it would be fun to try a game show.

“You never know if you are going to be fired from one minute to the next. The more skills I can attain the better off I will be. If you don’t like me in news, I can do talk. If you don’t like me in talk, wait: I can host a game show.”

Vieira says that even though the schedule is exhausting, she thinks her skills and experience carry her through.

“Maybe we are a bit like trained monkeys,” she says. “The light goes on and you start banging your cymbals.”