Jerry Springer’s Wildest Scandals, Revisited

Jerry Springer may have closed every show with his trademark sign-off, “Take care of yourself, and each other,” but The Jerry Springer Show didn’t give a damn about the thousands of men and women who graced its stage.

Exploiting its guests for tawdry and violent spectacles tailor-made to appeal to Americans’ lowest-common-denominator urges, it was a revolutionary extravaganza that chewed up and spit out freaks and geeks in a mad quest for notoriety and ratings. Even at its zenith, no viewer could claim that it was anything less than car crash television—an ugly and disastrous display from which you couldn’t turn your eyes away.

Boasting a title that would have been perfect for one of the talk show’s episodes, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is a two-part Netflix docuseries, premiering Jan. 7, that delivers about as much insight as one might expect from a 97-minute affair—which is to say, very little.

For the most part, it’s a nostalgia trip guided by interviews with infamous executive producer Richard Dominick and his underling producers Toby Yoshimura, Melinda Chait Mele, and Annette Grundy, all of whom recount the outrageousness, arduousness, and pressure of their gig. Plentiful scenes from the show’s heyday serve as reminders of the boundary-pushing lengths to which Springer and Dominick went to entertain the masses, and that material is occasionally amusing in a shameful, jaw-dropping sort of way.

Primarily, though, director Luke Sewell seems interested in superficial rehashing, in particular with regards to a 2000 murder involving three individuals who had previously aired their dirty laundry on the Springer set.

Grundy states in Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action that Springer’s success was partly attributable to the fact that “he didn’t judge.” The question, of course, is whether that was a good thing, given that he routinely platformed the worst of the worst, be it small-town adulterers, incestuous siblings, KKK members, or—most memorably—a man who married his Shetland pony.

Courting an avalanche of media coverage (and condemnation), that episode put The Jerry Springer Show over the top, allowing it to finally beat The Oprah Winfrey Show in the ratings, and it transformed its host into a cultural icon. The triumph of trash was complete, and Sewell makes clear that the show ushered in our current era of anything-goes vulgarity, complete with a clip from The Apprentice—in which Donald Trump makes a remark about a beautiful blonde looking good on her knees—to hammer home its true impact.

There’s no debating that The Jerry Springer Show was a net negative for pop culture (if not humanity), and Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action doesn’t try to argue otherwise, except via Yoshimura’s closing attempt to pin the blame for the show’s popularity on voyeuristic viewers who hungrily craved and devoured its garbage.

This is accurate as well, but it hardly absolves Dominick and his cronies for tapping into these basest instincts and manipulating them for profit. Yoshimura, Mele, and Grundy speak at length about the way in which they prepared guests for showtime by riling them up (“shaping the missile”) and rehearsing their impending on-air confrontations, all in an effort to guarantee physical fireworks. So common was this practice that it even had a name: “Being Springered.”

Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action contends that the real mastermind behind The Jerry Springer Show was Dominick, who pronounces in an old interview that “There is no line. If I could kill someone on television, I would execute ‘em on television.” Along the way Springer—who passed away in 2023 and is thus only seen and heard in old footage—shrugs off any responsibility for diving headfirst into the gutter, just as he spent most of his time on his show rolling his eyes, acting exasperated, and making jokey quips about the mayhem unfolding before the cameras.

Springer’s friendly, milquetoast persona and sense of humor were key to The Jerry Springer Show’s formula, providing a likable contrast with his guests’ low-brow raunchiness. As noted by Robert Feder, however, Springer—who’d previously been the mayor of Cincinnati and a local news anchor—undoubtedly knew that what he was peddling was bad and wrong, and Dominick admits that Springer went along with this lunacy because he loved being a celebrity.

Despite being busted for having a threesome with two guests, he faced no consequences because that’s what people expected from the king of trash TV. Even accusations that the series’ fights were phony—a charge that Dominick and others dismiss as preposterous—didn’t harm its meteoric ascent.

What ultimately did put a dent in The Jerry Springer Show was a 2000 episode (“Secret Mistresses Confronted”) featuring Ralf Panitz, his wife Eleanor Panitz, and his ex-wife Nancy Campbell-Panitz. On the day the episode aired, Ralf murdered Nancy; in Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, Nancy’s son Jeffrey discusses the show’s central role in the tragedy, for which it never accepted any responsibility. This is no surprise, really, considering that every former staffer interviewed is upfront about the fact that their job was simply to give people a platform to tell their stories; aiding them, or making sure that their appearances didn’t exacerbate their problems, was never in the cards.

In the end, Springer’s reign concluded because his schtick got old; at a certain point, there was no way to keep upping the ante without treading into profane and illegal territory. His show’s legacy, meanwhile, is that it lowered the bar to previously unreached depths, thereby helping usher in the age of impropriety we’ve yet to escape.