In the 1990s, the Jerry Springer Show was widely agreed to be a harbinger of civilisation’s imminent downfall. With its duelling Ku Klux Klan members, betrayed lovers and oddballs who took the concept of “animal fancier” much too far, the series was regarded as a trashy canary in a coal mine soon to come crashing down on our heads. What next? Donald Trump in the White House?
With hindsight, it is obvious that this violent, obnoxiously gonzo “talkshow” was where the weirdos congregated before the Internet. That its poison would seep out into the world at large is briefly acknowledged in the horribly fascinating and admirably thorough two-part Netflix documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, with a cutaway to Donald Trump delivering one of his Punch and Judy election rallies.
Yet even as the world was remade in its ding-dong image, the programme itself proved surprisingly resilient. It was cancelled only in 2018 – five years before Springer’s death at age 79. The late presenter was not interviewed for Fights, Camera, Action and emerges as an ambivalent figure. In person, he seemed charming and humble and made no great claims for the Jerry Springer Show. Far from it: speaking shortly before his death, he accepted that it had “ruined the culture”.
Yet that shame did not prevent him from trousering millions from the production and from participating in the humiliation of often poorly educated and shell-shocked guests, typically whipped to a frenzy by cynical producers and unleashed before the cameras. More than once, they were told that if they didn’t deliver the goods punch-up-wise, they would not be supplied with a plane ticket home.
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If Springer was the wilfully naive figurehead, the driving force behind the scenes was producer Richard Dominick, who transplanted the lurid formula he had developed as a tabloid newspaper editor to daytime TV. He recalls a fateful walk with Springer close to the show’s Chicago studio during which he laid it out for the presenter: Dominik could transform the ailing series, but it would mean taking the low road. Springer hesitated – but not too long and into the gutter they went.
The consequences were often disastrous – for the crew and the guests, as we see in a gripping film that does not flinch from the horror of what Springer unleashed. Producer Toby Yoshimura recalls the pressure he was under to book guests with ludicrous stories. “The only way that I could deal with it was, I was s**t-faced hammered for four days. And then the tequila would stop working ... cocaine’s right on the heels of it.”
The impact on the punters shoved before the cameras was direr still. In 2000, one of the guests murdered another two months after an episode about their love triangle was broadcast. We see Springer expressing his (relatively mild) horror at the killing of Nancy Campbell-Panitz by her ex-husband Ralf Panitz but insisting it had nothing at all to do with emotions stirred up when they appeared in his Chicago bear pit, along with Panitz’s second wife, Eleanor.
The victim’s son, Jeffrey Campbell, tells a different story. “I don’t think my mom had any idea what she was walking into. It’s pretty obvious that they were there to ambush her,” he says. “The producers wanted them to get physical, make threats and she wasn’t about to do that ... I just wish I could return and say, ‘Don’t do it’.”
His trauma is in contrast to the matter-of-fact way in which producer Dominick talks about Jerry Springer. Asked to comment about a segment where a man kisses his horse “wife” on air, he shrugs. “Greatest story ever told,” he says. “A guy marries a horse.”
He does not regard the Jerry Springer Show as something to be ashamed of, and you can see why he would feel that way. The tasteless sleaze Springer paraded across the screen has long since been eclipsed by the great dumbing down of culture off camera. Jerry Springer and his associates may have given us a glimpse of that world, but we were the ones who built it.
