'It was the closest thing to a combat zone'
Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
- Michael Hodges
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“Vulgar, vile, exploiting, dangerous” is just one of the criticisms that come thick and fast during the two-part Netflix documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, about America’s most notorious chat show. Running between 1991 and 2018, there was on-screen nudity, barely credible storylines (I Married a Horse, anyone?) and explosive confrontations between spurned lovers. It made its eponymous presenter a star, but a dismayed Oprah Winfrey argued the show was “a vulgarity circus” that cheapened the national discourse.
Springer, who died of pancreatic cancer aged 79 in 2023, invariably played down the show’s wider social influence, claiming on one occasion, “Television does not and must not create values”. Fights, Camera, Action director Luke Sewell disagrees. “He was being disingenuous when he said that, and I think he knew it.”
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Sewell, who is British, watched The Jerry Springer Show as a teenager. “It was wild,” he says of episodes variously featuring battling strippers and punch-ups between the Jewish Defence League and the Ku Klux Klan… in full regalia. “But ultimately it ushered in the world of reality TV we have today,” Sewell argues.
More than that, perhaps. As Springer himself said in 2019, “The thing that annoys me about Trump is that he took my show and brought it to the White House”. There has, says Sewell, been a “Springerfication of society.”
The son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Springer was born in Highgate tube station in 1944 when the station was being used as a bomb shelter. Taken to the US as a child, he later launched a political career and served as a mayor and city councillor in Cincinnati. Obliged to step down after being found to have paid for a prostitute with a personal cheque, he ran for office again saying, “Well, it shows my credit is good” and won. Springer then moved into presenting television news, where his easy on-screen charm brought Emmy Awards and a current affairs chat show on Chicago’s NBC. That first version of The Jerry Springer Show failed to create ratings, until American tabloid journalist Richard Dominick, referred to as a “diabolic genius” in the documentary, was appointed executive producer in 1991. Now the show was to be a conveyor belt of the freakish and damaged; nothing was out of bounds. “There is no line to draw,” Dominick said, when asked what he wouldn’t put on Jerry Springer. “If I could execute people on TV, I would.”
Jerry Springer ahead of the 25th season special of his show.
Former Springer Show producer Tobias Yoshimura was tasked with the relentless quest for guests. “We called them ‘fresh meat’ stories,” he tells me. “If a relationship was breaking up recently, it was still fresh. And all of us know that feeling, that sort of raw, like someone’s dragged your heart across a cheese grater. Those are the stories that you want.”
Ideally the encounter that followed would lead to an on-camera altercation. “The fights were exciting, especially when you got your guests to where they wanted to be,” says Yoshimura of the intense pre-show mood-management each episode required. “Rev them up into a tornado then send them out on stage,” he says in the documentary. Was he setting them up? “If I call you and say, ‘Hey, your wife wants to come on this show and talk to you about some stuff going on in your marriage’, do you think that it’s going to be good or bad?”
Dominick’s regime brought undreamed of success. At one point ratings for Jerry Springer overtook Oprah Winfrey’s to become the biggest chat show in the US, but the need for ever-weirder stories increased. “The show was predicated on outrage and controversy,” says Sewell. “And that became the trap they found themselves in. They had to keep topping themselves.”
“I guess it was the closest thing to a combat zone,” says Yoshimura. “That’s the metaphor I would use.”
And like a combat zone, there were casualties. Nancy Campbell appeared on the episode Secret Mistresses Confronted in 2000, believing she was about to be re-united with her ex-husband Ralf Panitz on screen. Instead, she was subjected to ridicule and verbal abuse by her ex-husband and his new wife Eleanor. Campbell left the show in a daze and wandered the streets of Chicago before a stranger paid for her bus fare back to Florida. The night the episode was broadcast Panitz watched in a bar then entered Campbell’s house and beat her to death.
Jerry Springer. Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Panitz, whose DNA was found under Campbell’s fingernails, was given a life sentence and so – in a way – was her son Jeffrey, who appears in the documentary. Still traumatised by the very public loss of his mother he feels, understandably, that more could have been done to protect her. “It raises the idea of duty of care,” says Sewell. “How dangerous it is to meddle with people’s messy lives. That’s why it’s an important story to tell now.”
Producers were accused of manipulating their guests, but the show also took its toll on the people making it. Yoshimura worked 15-hour days for weeks on end and used alcohol and drugs to keep the reality of what he was doing at bay. But some stories were too much. Yoshimura booked a young woman who was in an apparently coercive sexual relationship with her father and, remarkably, the father agreed to appear onscreen as well. The night before the show Yoshimura went to the daughter’s hotel room and found the father there, clearly having just had sex with the daughter. “That was like an atom bomb going off in my mind. I just couldn’t get my head around it,” he says. “It was the end for me, at least I took five years off. Though I honestly never thought I was ever going to come back.”
Yet for a while he did return, drawn back by a show that was as addictive to make as it was to watch and even, at one point, voted the world’s worst-ever television show. Throughout it all, Springer maintained an amiable bemused screen presence, contriving to distance himself from the damage being done in his name. “His answer to complaints was, ‘It’s just television, it’s just a stupid show,’” says Sewell. “Which was a very clever way of being able to deflect any criticism.”
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Springer even deflected Sewell’s documentary. “We contacted Jerry and his people to see if they would partake in it. Ultimately, they declined and then we had the news that he’d passed away. So, it’s hard to get into his head, but he must have known what the show was. Ultimately, Jerry Springer made a Faustian pact. He did sell out.”
Authors
Michael Hodges
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