Jerry Springer Defined Reality Television As We Know It — and Not for the Better

On April 28, 2023, politician, journalist, and television personality Jerry Springer passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer, he was 79 years old. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.” Everyone has said or heard this at least once, it’s just something you shout out when you witness some kind of confrontation — even the hit HBO show Euphoria made the reference. We all know what it means, and we all know where it comes from, the peak of tabloid trash television which ran from 1991 to 2018, over 5000 episodes: Jerry Springer.

He crossed over with WWE, The Simpsons, Austin Powers, his work was adapted into a British opera (no, seriously), in the era of the talk show, he was one of the few that persisted to the end of the 1990s and beyond. He was the Oprah Winfrey of controversy, he could even beat Oprah in the ratings at her peak, he saw no end of protests by parents, religious figures, and the Chicago city council, and yet his show continued in all its questionable glory.

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The Genesis of Jerry Springer

That glory is questionable, don’t get me wrong. Springer was a figurehead of bad taste by many; his methods, and especially the producers’, were considered exploitative and only added to the unreality of reality talk shows, as they would actively goad their guests into physical violence. His show answered the question “how low can you go?” and then some. People would come on, air the dirtiest of their laundry, infidelity, strange fetishes, family dramas, get into a brawl, and literally get their fifteen minutes of fame. Springer seemed to have no shame about this, proudly proclaiming his show the worst of all time at the beginning of each episode.

It wasn’t always like this, though. In its first three years, Jerry Springer was a daytime talk show that was relatively cookie-cutter, especially for the time, just another Phil Donahue look-a-like. One might even call it boring, and the network certainly did, threatening to pull the plug on Springer if things didn’t turn around. With the introduction of Richard Dominick as executive producer, changes were absolutely made. They got raunchier, asking questions about sex, talking about sex addiction and infidelity, and by the late 1990s it was, in no uncertain terms, the modern-day answer to a freak show, exploitation included. A spectacle of violence and human indignity, as it was described in docuseries Dark Side Of The 90s, while many talk show hosts in the 1990s, including Winfrey, would dabble in depravity before abandoning it, Springer embraced it with open arms. First with the freak-show style of voyeurism, which then became a series of brawls for the audience to freely jeer and heckle at.

On one hand, the audience was absolutely there, the lowest common denominator or not, it had the ratings. On the other, it’s Jerry Springer, and even the very early episodes do not hold up to modern sensibilities in human empathy at all. But the genesis of Jerry Springer was not only an answer to the surrounding culture of the ’90s, where the beginnings of tabloid television really started to take shape with events such as the capture and trial of OJ Simpson in 1994, but dare I say was inevitable, with or without its host. Springer was simply the first to truly tap into this nasty little instinct many of us try to suppress, and that success is what started an era of television: We love watching people, people we see as beneath us, make an absolute fool of themselves.

The Pervasive Formula of Tabloid Television

Yes, we. You, the person reading this article, me, the one writing it, everyone. A good lot of us reject the feeling, of course, it’s morally abhorrent to ridicule the less fortunate, but we also all look down at our noses on someone. A fight in a parking lot, the rich people on television who scream and cry about nothing, people you know in your own life, even your past self. Trash television taps into that inclination, from the safety of our living rooms, or in a live studio audience, we can point at someone and say “look at that idiot.” While blissfully ignorant to the fact that if a few things had gone differently in our own lives, we could’ve easily been in their place. Keeping that in mind, it’s no wonder the incredible impact this show made on television history.

Because while Jerry Springer was absolutely a response to the country-wide Attitude Era that was 1990s media culture, it also made that culture, and then ran it into the next decade and the next. Springer started his career trying and failing to copy those around him, and when his own show picked up, he was the one being copied. He made Maury Povich turn his talk show around, giving him his own iconic quote in “You are not the father!” Other hosts tried to revamp their own programs because they saw the ratings Springer was getting on his own.

After that of course came the spiritual successors, of which there are many. Dr. Phil went to air in 2002, which is arguably worse with the host, Phil McGraw, masking the same exploitation with the pretensions of being a well-meaning counselor. Across the pond broadcaster Jeremy Kyle creates The Jeremy Kyle Show in 2005, and finds his niche in an abrasive personality a la Gordon Ramsay, often berating his guests in what has been described as “human bear-baiting.” The source is the same, and so was the longevity, with both shows running well over a decade, with Dr. Phil running for twenty years before its cancelation. Trisha Goddard, Steve Wilkos, an endless barrage of “courtroom” reality television such as Paternity Court. Regardless of the ethics, which are suspect, to say the least, the formula works, and it keeps working even today.

Cringe Culture: The Spiritual Child of Jerry Springer

Jerry Springer was not a relic of the 1990s, nor was his show. It ran until 2018, and he picked up right after with Judge Jerry, which ran from 2019 to 2022. While the audience fell off for him, what he jumped on, capitalized on, and made a career out of stayed consistent, even picking up steam with the true advent of social media. Trash television isn’t dead, it’s just called cringe culture now, and it can get even more insidious than Springer ever could. The internet is such a vast landscape, and no corner of depravity has been left untouched, and people can pull days worth of content out of picking apart just one person they deem weird and depraved enough. YouTube compilations, Twitter feeds, just mindlessly scrolling on social media, and you’ll see someone pointing and laughing at someone else that they deem below them. And you’ll think, at the very least, my life isn’t so bad, at least I’m not that guy.

Maybe Springer saw it from the very beginning, with his experience as an Emmy-winning news anchor he likely saw no shortage of political pundits getting down and dirty with each other. He likely watched them erupting into vitriolic arguments more for the enjoyment of an audience rather than the sake of journalism. Maybe he saw that everyone needs a villain to put themselves up against, everyone craves a target to make themselves feel more powerful, more correct. Far be it from me to speculate, though. That’s what trash television, tabloid television, and even reality television’s villain edits in general are at the end of the day, a parade of villains and targets. Maybe it is wrong, as much as it sometimes can feel right to some, and it absolutely is exploitative. But in the era of Jerry Springer and beyond, it undeniably worked.