Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action

In 2014 Jerry Springer said, “I’d like to take this opportunity to frankly apologise for everything I’ve ever done in television. I have ruined the culture.”

Then he added, “And now I have to get on my plane.”

His talk show would run another four years.

The Jerry Springer Show ran from 1991 to 2018, making the former Cincinnati mayor and ex news anchor a multi-millionaire.

It was also the trashiest of the US talk shows, steered by a former tabloid journalist Richard Dominick making outrageous demands of his producing team in a salacious push for ratings.

“Richard was the svengali who controlled the show” – producer.

It worked. The NBC show would eventually surpass talk queen Oprah Winfrey with its “modern day version of the Roman Colosseum.” Guests with outlandish stories and personal grudges would come onto the show and unravel in screaming matches or even on stage fights.

In a new two part documentary series, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, Dominick and several of his team reflect -with varying levels of shock, delight or guilt- at what the show put into American homes across nearly three decades.

At the centre of it was Jerry Springer, who died in 2023, an agreeable chap who refrained from judging his guests.

“I don’t do a talk show, I do a circus” – Jerry Springer.

Dominick, who had a history of penning outrageous National Enquirer headlines, built a dull talk show lost in a sea of clones into something so sensational viewers could not look away. Episodes were titled, “Stripper Wars,” “I Refuse to Wear Clothes” and the gob-smacking “I Married a Horse.”

Show producers, looking back on their tactics, speak of coaching guests (known as “shaping the missile”) and withdrawing return flights if guests walked off set. Many guests were ambushed on set by a rival they did not know was coming. Most were drawn from a geographic area betwween Ohio, Arkansas and Georgia nicknamed the “Springer Triangle” and most had never seen the bright lights of Chicago were the show was filmed.

While producers bring some perspective to their darkest of TV arts, the elderly Dominick appears proud of his achievements and his mission to make the show #1.

“If I could kill someone on television I would execute them,” – Dominick

History will recall the show very nearly did just that, when an ex-guest was convicted of the murder of another guest, killed hours after an episode screened.

“Are ratings more important than the dignity of life? Shame on you, shame on you,” a judge would later observe.

While episode one of the doco centres on the rise and outrageousness of the Springer show, episode two looks to its downfall. I was hoping for some mention of Jerry Springer: The Opera which weighed in on the theatrics and morality of the whole damn thing.

And “my final thought” as Jerry would say… Television has been doing a fair bit of navel gazing and mea culpas in recent times, in documentaries about Nickelodeon, FOX News, Jimmy Savile, as well as in pop music, hip hop, RnB.

If it’s fitting that The Jerry Springer Show joins their ranks then perhaps like the Romans at the Colosseum we need to ask what part we played in it all by being a bloodthirsty audience or, perhaps, complicit bystanders, leaving a legacy that is now echoed in trashy Reality TV clashes ad infinitum.

Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action screens Tuesday January 7 on Netflix.