Farewell Jerry Springer, the Patron Saint of American Dysfunction

R.I.P. to the great Jerry Springer, who died Thursday at 79. This man revolutionized daytime TV — he was the Martha Graham of afternoon talk-show slap-and-punch choreography. His eponymously titled show was a beautifully bizarre pageant of dysfunctional American life: you watched strangers sit down onstage, listened to them confess horrible betrayals, and waited for them to lunge out of their chairs and scream. There was something so cathartic in it. You felt cheated if you watched an episode where nobody got into a brawl.

Jerry was not like other talk-show hosts. He did not give the Oprah “I feel your pain” eyes or the Phil Donahue “aaaw, what a shame” brow or the Ricki Lake “I’m so horrified” faceplam. This guy did not do sanctimony. He loved to boast that he would never watch his own show. Jerry summed up his show in a classic 1998 Rolling Stone cover story, at his peak: “It’s chewing gum, it’s silly, it’s outrageous, it’s stupid, it’s a spoof, it’s a fraternity party on the air, it’s crazy.”

But Springer’s show was an intricately ritualized theater of American despair, like the recognition scene in an Elizabethan drama. It introduced a whole new vocabulary of Kabuki-style TV gestures. The image of the guest suddenly jumping up from their chair, trying to rise as fast as possible before too much elbow-jostling gives away the surprise. The dialogue of “Honey, I have something I need to tell you” into “We have a little surprise for you folks today” into “How could you do this to our family?” Bleep! Bleep! I can’t believe you bleep wait I love you bleeep! The security goons jumping in. The extra-secret guest stashed away in the wings. It was like Middle American yoga, with asanas like Hi, I Slept With Your Stepson’s Fiancee or Cheating Husband Sees Sidepiece Step from Curtains. Bleeeeep!

There were confrontational talk shows before him, but weasels like Geraldo Rivera or Morton Downey Jr. had a slimy aura of moralizing. Not Jerry’s style. He never got mixed up in the violence — as he always joked, it’s because his Armani suits were rented. It was the first TV show in history where the security guys became stars. (Steve Wilkos was the moonlighting Chicago cop who got famous dragging knuckleheads apart. He went solo in 2007 to host The Steve Wilkos Show, which is still on the air.)

He became a new genre of celebrity. Roseanne Barr famously said at the time that Jerry Springer was the first Jewish man to become America’s rabbi. He came to America as a five-year-old immigrant in 1949 with his family of German-Jewish refugees after the Holocaust. Both his grandmothers died in the concentration camps. He was a lawyer and politician who became Mayor of Cincinnati in the 1970s — a Jewish liberal in the city that voted against FDR all four times. Springer was a hipster mayor, posing with visiting rock stars like Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, and Joni Mitchell. Tragically, we never got a Joni episode of Springer. (“Today’s show: Acid, Booze, and Ass; Needles, Guns and Grass; Lot of Laughs.”)

He also had a very Springer kind of sex scandal in 1974. Many politicians sneak around with sex workers, but only this one would get busted paying with a personal check. He went from politics to TV news, then got hired to do a talk show. To his shock — along with everyone else’s — it blew up like crazy in the late Nineties.

Newsday called it “very possibly the worst program in the history of television.” Jerry replied by copping this line as his intro to the show — except he left out the “possibly.” Right-wing politicians raged against it; William Bennett and Joe Lieberman gave it the “Silver Sewer” Award for 1997, calling it “cultural pollution.” Geraldo Rivera, of literally all people, said, “If that’s the level that the daytime business has sunk to, I’m so pleased not to be part of it anymore.” Well, exactly — Jerry was the opposite of Geraldo’s sniveling, moralizing voyeur hypocrisy. It’s why America loved him.

People always assumed the brawls were scripted. They were basically right. In the mind-blowing Rolling Stone cover story, a producer coaches a guest backstage, sketching out his whole tantrum in advance. She even coaches him on how to jump out of his chair fast enough to dodge the security goons. There was zero controversy about this revelation. The fact is, nobody felt disillusioned — people LIKED the idea that the show was full of fakery. As with pro wrestling, America liked the violence better that way.

Oprah and Jerry were America’s good-cop/bad-cop TV therapists — she was into conciliation; he provided a safe space for chaos. She empathized; Jerry kept his distance. He never got personally involved, which was soothing — you knew nobody was getting hurt on his watch.

His 1998 movie Ringmaster was a fictionalized parody of his show — but not so different from the real thing. In the opening scene, Jerry walks into the green room and sees two ladies smacking each other. “Break it up!,” he says, stepping in to separate them. “This is totally unacceptable!” Then he adds, “Save it for the show, okay?” I saw Ringmaster in the theater with my mom on Christmas — the rest of the family went to see Robin Williams as a doctor healing children with laughter in Patch Adams, but Mom and I couldn’t stomach the idea, so we just turned to Jerry. It felt like a more wholesome experience. (He didn’t own the show, or even his name — in Ringmaster, he couldn’t even use his name to play himself, so he was “Jerry Farrelly.”)

In later years, he tried a more dignified role with Judge Jerry, reminding everyone he went to law school. But it failed because it required him to have opinions — the essence of Jerry Springer was that he never judged anyone. He also did his Air America podcast Springer on the Radio, with admirably hard-hitting attacks on the Iraq war and the Republican regime. It lasted only a year; somehow, America wasn’t ready for “Jerry Springer, Voice of Reason.”

He did other TV over the years, but always competing with the Jerry he played on his show. He hosted America’s Got Talent in 2007, plus the dating-game Baggage for four years in the early 2010s on the Game Show Network. He was surprisingly great on The Masked Singer, crooning “The Way You Look Tonight” in insect drag as the “Beetle.” He got beaten by George Foreman, Linda Blair, and Chris Jericho, but at least he beat William Shatner, Eric Idle, and the brothers from The Brady Bunch. 

Springer finally went off the air in 2018 — but it outlived its era as a relic of 20th-century liberal democracy. In a time before Americans were required to carry little TVs in our pockets so we could constantly update our rage at strangers who dress weird or talk funny, people saved it all up for that hour with Jerry every afternoon. You’d have a tough time denying it was a slightly healthier mode of civilization. America watched people on Springer yell and scream and make asses of themselves — then we turned it off and got back to (pardon the expression) real life. Those were different times.

He signed off every show with the words, “Take care of yourself and each other.” These words were widely mocked — after all, if people took that advice, his show would’ve gone off the air in a week. But in his own way, he meant it. Like another famous Jerry, he was a weirdly benign elder, presiding over a new form of consensual-reality collective madness. May he rest in bleeeeep.