Is there anything The Jerry Springer Show wouldn’t do? The shock talkshow, an arena for people in love triangles to come to blows, also featured incest, white supremacists and a man who married his horse. “I did pitch a guy having an affair,” says Tobias Yoshimura, one of the show’s producers. “He was a necrophiliac. That one got shot down pretty quickly.” Perhaps not so much for matters of taste, as for the practicalities of television and any hopes of a good fight scene. The third guest – the shock reveal of the affair partner – says Yoshimura with a wry smile, “would have to be a cadaver. So that was the step too far.”
The Jerry Springer Show, which ran from 1991 before finally fizzling out in 2018, started as a mundane daytime talkshow, fronted by Springer, a mild-mannered news anchor and former mayor of Cincinnati. Threatened with cancellation because of its terrible ratings, its new executive producer, Richard Dominick, took it in a sensationalist direction. It became a phenomenon and at its height in the late 90s, its ratings were bigger than Oprah Winfrey’s. Morality campaigners held protests outside the studios; many others claimed it had corroded American society. Take it further and you could argue that it is (partly) responsible for everything from the worst of reality TV to the way people behave on social media and even the rise of Donald Trump. “He took my show and brought it to the White House,” Springer said in 2019.
A new two-part Netflix documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, examines the rise and influence of the show 25 years on from its peak. The director, Luke Sewell, who is British, remembers watching Jerry Springer as a teenager “and vividly thinking: how the hell is this on TV? Why are these people doing this? How are they getting people to act like this?” He started watching old episodes on YouTube. “It just felt so raw and visceral and shameless in the way that it was being packaged – that did kind of shock me.” He describes it as a “kind of Roman Colosseum – pure shock, pure spectacle, pure confrontation. And for it to have such success clearly opened the doors to reality TV, and I guess some of the things in the world today.”
The documentary covers the rise of the show – and its low points: the time the Ku Klux Klan were invited on; the sad, shocking and sometimes revolting stories; and the murder of Nancy Campbell-Panitz by her ex-husband, hours after the episode which they were on, along with the woman he was in a new relationship with, was aired in July 2000. Dominick is described by one TV critic as a “diabolical genius” – he appears in the documentary, but his most revealing admission is from an old BBC interview in which he says there is no line he wouldn’t cross, and that he would execute someone on television if he could.
Springer, who died last year, declined to take part in the documentary. However, footage shows him as a skilled operator – someone who often looked bewildered and dismayed by his guests and was quick to dismiss the show when faced with public criticism, as if he had found himself on it by accident, while at the same time profiting hugely from it. The documentary suggests Springer, a former Democratic politician and political reporter, had sold his soul. “I think it’s hard not to feel like that,” says Sewell. “That show was not contributing anything positive to the world and he seemed a principled guy at heart, but it brought him great notoriety, fame and riches. I will say that everyone talked very fondly of Jerry. I think a key part of the show’s success was him as a host … He’s been given a fairly easy ride because you think of the show and then you think of him almost as separate – that’s quite something to pull off. You could see the gifted politician.”
People would call in to get on the show and, as one of a handful of producers, it was Yoshimura’s job to call them back and prise out their stories, then convince them, as well as others who might be involved in whatever the gruesome situation, to come on TV and bare all. “It’s a numbers game, right?” he says when we speak over a video call. “The more phone calls you make, the more likely it is.” He had done a few jobs in TV, but was working in a Chicago bar when he got the Springer job. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says, but it turned out he was good at it.
Yoshimura mostly made shows about what he calls “unusual lifestyle stories”. “It’s not really love triangles. It’s more like: ‘I have a woman with a food fetish, she’s 750lb, and she’s super passionate about getting in her hot tub, filling it with creamed corn and doing the backstroke while licking the toes of her 4ft 1in secret lover who is a bondage dungeon master.’ That’s funny, and it’s a visual that you will never forget.”
He says he wouldn’t put anyone on the show who was too vulnerable, but he has a few regrets about those who did appear. “There’s just some stuff that I wish I hadn’t opened the door to” – he cites some of the guests with fetishes as an example. Does he ever feel people were exploited? That’s a “pretty strong term. I don’t know if you would call it exploitation. Going on The Jerry Springer Show was like going into the thunderdome; they were gladiator games, and if you weren’t ready to confront 300 audience members screaming at you, I hadn’t done my job. So I’m going to prepare you for that, and if that means I’ve got to fire you up like a football coach at half-time, I’m doing that. I don’t think that’s exploitation.”
Most of the guests were under-educated, low-paid and from poor parts of the US – the so-called Springer triangle, between Tennessee, Ohio and Georgia. Some appeared to have mental health issues. Condescending though this is, maybe they needed someone not to put them on TV to be shouted and laughed at? “What that statement says to me is that unless you’re a certain economic class, you’re not allowed to be on television, and that’s bullshit,” says Yoshimura. “Please tell me the difference between the fight I saw on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last night and The Jerry Springer Show. Money. That’s the only difference.” (Sewell, I think, is with me: the show wasn’t “showing them at their greatest moment and they didn’t have any sort of power”.)
If it was tough on the guests, it was equally tough on the people who made the show. It was nerve-racking – each producer created one show a week, with several guests. They had to find them, convince them to appear, fly them to Chicago and deal with any last-minute wobbles; they couldn’t totally relax until those people were walking (or preferably storming) off stage, having delivered a whole lot of drama. Yoshimura would rev them up beforehand, building up their excitement, dousing them with energy drinks, maybe even throwing a chair across the dressing room. “Like, now you’re awake, maybe now you understand what you’re about to face,” he says.
In the documentary, one guest talked about being encouraged to go out the night before and to drink, then being taken to the studio early in the morning on very little sleep. Yoshimura mentions “reaching into their brains” and pushing the buttons that will fire them up. Wasn’t he playing them? “I don’t know that you can call it playing them. I know things that really hurt them about the situation they’re in, and they felt very strongly that they wanted to get that message across to the other person.” They all wanted to be on the show, he stresses. “I can’t force them to get on the plane.” But once they’re there, it was his job to get them on to that stage? “That’s true. Absolutely, it’s my job to make sure that they are super excited about what’s in store for them.”
He coped with the pressure, he says, “with massive amounts of tequila and cocaine and whatever else I could get hold of. I was in bad shape; it was really hard on me. I can’t speak for all the producers there. Everybody had their own way of blowing off steam and mine was self-destruction.” He left the show after being broken by a particularly appalling story involving the sexual abuse of a young woman by her father. “That kind of stuff is hard to live with.”
Melinda Chait Mele, who worked with Yoshimura, didn’t self-destruct in the same way, but when she was fired in 1999 – she had unwittingly booked guests who turned out to be fake – she says she slept for three weeks solid. Before she started working on The Jerry Springer Show in 1997, Chait Mele had worked for tabloids, including the National Enquirer. As a producer, she would often work in the office overnight and through weekends. “It was crazy pressure. I think we all felt it,” she says. “At the same time, it was a heady experience. We were on a wildly popular show. It was super exciting.”
Chait Mele was the producer of the show about bestiality, including a man who “married” his horse – an episode that was pulled from the US TV schedules. “That was a disappointment for me,” she says. “Everybody knows about it, but nobody’s seen it … I really do feel if it had been aired, people may feel differently about it, because in my opinion it was a show about mostly a very troubled man who was very public about his being a troubled man.”
Did she ever feel any of the people she put on perhaps shouldn’t have gone on, or didn’t quite know what they were letting themselves in for? “No,” she says instantly. “My stories were about families and lovers and things like that, so when I vetted people, one of the questions I asked them was: ‘Have you seen the show?’ If they said no, I would say: ‘Well, I recommend you watch it, because this is not your calm, normal sit-down talkshow.’
“I strongly believe that every single person that went on that show really wanted to. They may have regretted it, who knows – the result of a ‘secret’ show [such as a lover revealed, or a paternity test] might not have come out the way they wanted it to, or maybe later it didn’t work out the way they wanted it to.” She insists she wasn’t involved in pressing guests, or even threatening them with – as the documentary reveals – making them pay for their own return travel if they pulled out of the show at the last minute. “I may have said things like that before they got there – don’t waste our time and money. We kind of had this spiel. I think it was more a tactic than anything else to just kind of let them know that there was a lot on the line.”
In the documentary, Chait Mele says people really did think the show would be able to help with their problems. But for the makers, it was only about entertainment and ratings, wasn’t it? “I mean, for me, it was about ratings, but for them, it was about something else. And that’s OK: life has contradictions in it. They came on because they wanted to, and a lot of people did think that Jerry was going to solve all their problems.” Many of the show’s guests “went home and lived their lives. It was cathartic. They had this arena where they could say literally anything they wanted to these other people, behave however they wanted. They could really show how upset and angry they felt … I think that Jerry did help them, even though it was an explosive show.”
Chait Mele also believes the show played a cultural role in “a loosening-up of the holding-in of things. I think people became able to express themselves more openly, more obnoxiously, more in your face.” Is there a through-line from Springer to Trump? Around that time, she points out, Trump was quick to start public feuds, “so he was also a part of this rolling toward it being OK to say horrible things to other people, to just say whatever falls out of your face”. Yoshimura adds: “I think Trump paved the road for Trump. I don’t think we had anything to do with that.”
Guests were harangued not just by Springer, but by the audience – a precursor of the online mob. “This is where I think The Jerry Springer Show really was a big part of a change in the way people behave in public toward each other,” says Chait Mele. Does she regret her part in that? “No, not really. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but I’m really proud of my time there. I don’t regret my shows.”
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action premieres on Netflix on 7 January
