What Jerry sprang on us
By watching, were we complicit in fuelling toxic talk shows?
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- Caroline Frost
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Initially, Jerry Springer plays it straight as he introduces his next guests to the audience: “There’s been controversy about all the fights. Today we have a love story.” Out comes Mark, a man who has left his wife and two daughters, followed by his spouse of five years, Pixel – a Shetland pony.
This isn’t even the strangest moment in Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, a two-part Netflix documentary charting the rise and fall of The Jerry Springer Show, a TV juggernaut that variously pitched itself as a champion of free speech, toppled Oprah Winfrey from the ratings summit, stood accused of ruining US culture, and was implicated in the murder of a guest.
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We meet Springer as a former mayor of Cincinnati, an award-winning news anchor pitching up in Chicago with the idea of making a talk show. Only when this Doctor Faust recruits his Mephistopheles in the guise of executive producer Richard Dominick, do the pair sign their own deal with the devil. Or, as Dominick remembers putting it to Springer, “We’re on at two o’clock in the morning. Let’s have some fun.”
The special formula, says one producer, is “Jerry, smart, genial, self-deprecating, this highbrow personality dealing with lowbrow problems – genius”. Sure enough, the affable Kilroy-with-a-bouffant stands smiling as romantic dumpers are reunited with dumpees, wives are introduced to mistresses, brawls break out and ratings go through the roof. Comparing himself to Oprah, Springer says, “She does a talk show. I do a circus, just no lions.”
From the perspective of 2024, the red flags are all there. Producers are seen winding up participants into spinning tops of fury just before they go on air. And that’s before we get to 2000, when one guest, Ralf Panitz, was convicted of killing his ex-wife Nancy hours after the pair were featured, with his new wife, on an episode about love triangles.
Oprah does a talk show. I do a circus, just no lions
Lest we snuggle too comfortably onto our high moral perches, something to remember: the show was cancelled as recently as 2018. It had weathered greeting Ku Klux Klan members on stage, the aforementioned murder, and even its host being filmed in a romp with a guest. Only when lawyers clamped down on antics and the ratings tanked was the show binned. When Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing as morality, that the market would decide, she was surely thinking of Jerry Springer.
How far have we come? In 2019, Jeremy Kyle’s similarly zoo-styled show saw its own tragedy with Steve Dymond taking his own life after failing a lie detector test on air. A coroner found no causal link between the show and Dymond’s death – similar to Springer’s distancing from the Panitz murder: “I hope they get the killer, the rest is just television.” Did he remember them appearing on his stage? “No.”
Jeremy Kyle. ITV
But is it ever just television? The UK has seen a tightening of guidelines for any shows involving the public, since tragedy not just on Kyle’s show but also Love Island, recognising that guests should be prepared for how appearing on TV might affect their lives. Yet the circus moves on – to Real Housewives, to Kardashians, where everyone involved knows that only someone’s deep pain ensures big ratings.
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One Springer producer says, “Everybody only wants to hear about the Shetland pony, the murder that was or wasn’t our fault. If none of that happened, there’s no documentary. But, you know, we’re the problem.” Let’s not be hypocrites: even watching this makes us complicit.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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