The Jerry Springer Show wasn’t just trash – it was evil ...Middle East

We like to think the world has moved on from The Jerry Springer Show. That the headlines, the brawls, the chanting, the storm-outs, the burly headsetted producers and their on-stage interventions, the flashing and the “Jerry beads” were all part of some hideous turn-of-the-century fever in which standards and tastes degraded to an all-time low. An era we have left behind, an era from which we have learnt.  

Yes, it led to copycat confrontation-heavy, bear-baiting chat shows (Jeremy Kyle) or reality shows (Keeping Up with the Kardashians) or dating shows (Married at First Sight); yes, it paved the way for race-to-the-bottom Channel 5 documentaries about men marrying wooden bannisters or Channel 4 poverty porn like Benefits Street. But we are confident we’d never sink that low again. We like to feel superior. We have aftercare now. We are above it.  

But I know we are not. Because watching Fights, Camera, Action, Netflix’s horrifying but not remotely surprising two-part documentary about the 27-year rise and fall of the notorious culture-rotting phenomenon, my greatest reaction was not drawn from the grim admissions from its architects, whose overlord Richard Dominick brags: “If I could execute someone on TV I would.”  

It came from archive footage – specifically the episode titled, “I’m pregnant by my brother”. I watched a two-hour exposé about all the ways willing, naïve, mostly uneducated people were exploited in the name of viewing figures and scandal, about the scale of the lives and families ruined across its nearly 4000 episodes, and my first response was still to ogle them, still to brandish them incestuous sickos and lowlifes. The Jerry Springer era of TV is over, but that nasty impulse within us remains.  

Jerry Springer was a news man with political ambitions. His show started off in 1991 as a late-night topical talk show. But with flatlining viewing figures, tabloid king Dominick was brought in. Under his rule, it metastasised into a sensationalist success story and his producers and Springer himself were corrupted. Its magic formula was simple: Chicago media elites profited from the saddest stories of America’s white working class. 

Fights, Camera, Action is an engrossing documentary. Former producers tell us things we reasonably already know – like the supremacy of audience ratings and the limitless tactics permitted to chase them, the manipulation of its participants by plying them with booze (or worse), how they would rehearse arguments backstage and incite violence, and the ripple effects of the programme’s destruction. But they operated at such evil extremes you can’t believe they are willing to show their faces.  

We are told about the deprived “Springer triangle” between Tennessee, Ohio and Georgia from which “75 per cent” of guests came. Producers brag about making them “feel beholden to you” so they would do as they were told, how they would deny return plane tickets to those who did not co-operate in their own humiliation. The thrill they felt when someone called in to tell them something like, say, they’d left their wife and family for a Shetland pony. “And the difference between you and bestiality is what…? Oh, the animal loves you back…”  

But there is no real mea culpa here, no real reckoning. Sobering testimony from the son of a woman murdered by her ex-husband the day their episode was broadcast in 2000, whose tragedy was lost in the sensation of the programme, is not enough for those involved to accept blame. It is with a grim kind of pride that they look back on it. They opened Pandora’s box of trash TV and astutely cashed in on the grossest human weakness for voyeurism, taboo, and disgust.  

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Springer himself, who died in 2023, is secondary. We are told by his former colleagues about what a nice, intelligent, decent, non-judgemental man he was, as if it absolves him of responsibility for the monster created in his name. He himself called The Jerry Springer Show a “circus”, mocked it, said it “ruined culture”, apologised for it, said “I don’t want to live in a country that watches my show”.  

He was often celebrated for that self-effacing detachment. But what he was really doing was asserting that the types of people he platformed, encouraged, or entertained, were beneath him. The confronting Fights, Camera, Action ought to remind us that those people were really his victims, and there is no moral high ground in delighting in their misery.  

‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ is streaming on Netflix

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