[bell dings]
- I thought the most outrageous thing I could do
in this lifetime was to have sex with 300 men.
So I did it.
- In the 90s, talk shows are the most provocative thing
on television.
- You had Oprah, Sally, Phil, Geraldo, myself.
- At one time, there were two dozen talk shows competing
in the marketplace.
- You need to find your own man.
- You're talking bulls.
- And the most violent.
[crowd cheering]
- The fists would start flying,
the chairs would start falling.
- They literally tore the place apart.
- No boundaries go uncrossed.
- I can't just do all this to me.
- None dealt as low as Jerry Springer.
- We were the bad guys.
- Until a m*rder.
- You rub two sticks together and you get fired.
- Forces a reckoning.
- It literally became a matter of life and death.
[upbeat music]
[upbeat music]
- It is very hard to forgive you for what you did to me,
but I do forgive you.
[crowd applauding]
- Daytime talk shows.
No other form of media mirrors the American psyche
quite like them.
- How many women have gone to the grave,
never saying anything?
- Today, people are revealing--
- And in the 90s, they flood the airwaves completely.
- At one time, there were two dozen talk shows competing
in the marketplace for essentially the same audience.
- Oprah, Sally, Phil, Geraldo, myself.
- Mary Lou Henner, Charles Perez,
Vanessa somebody that was on the Cosby show.
- We all went after those topics
that people had never seen before.
- What starts out as a forum to discuss social issues
and current events quickly devolves into pure spectacle.
- Oprah was like the mom show and then you had Maury.
- When it comes to three year old Kaniah,
you are not the father.
[crowd cheering]
- That was, you are not the father or you are the father.
Jenny Jones was like more of a social issues kind of thing.
- You never fit in, shy, bookworm, weekly sort of.
- But when it comes to trash TV, one name says it all.
- Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.
- Jerry Springer was the show where everybody would fight.
- Obviously she's not doing something right in the bedroom
or he wouldn't be.
[crowd cheering]
- That was the fighting show and like,
and that's kind of what people would tune in for
and it's definitely what people would go
to tapings of the show to see.
[crowd cheering]
- None delved as low as Jerry Springer.
Here she is, mom.
[crowd cheering]
- He was the absolute lowest of the low.
- Jerry, Jerry.
- I'm Robert Feeder, I'm a journalist
who's been covering the media in Chicago
for more than 40 years.
- Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.
- The irony is that there was a point at which
the Jerry Springer show was the number one talk show
in daytime television.
It actually beat Oprah Winfrey at its peak
and yet it was a talk show where there was very little
talking.
People didn't talk, it was about the conflict
and the Jerry, Jerry.
I think most people were watching it and saying,
who are these people?
- The guests, especially on a show like Jerry Springer,
they wanna feel like they're leaving a mark on the world
and you know, unless they become a serial k*ller
or sprout two heads, how are they gonna get on television?
- You say you've been a dog, who have you been a dog with?
- Her best friend.
- My name's Laura Grindstaff, I'm a professor of sociology
at UC Davis and I'm the author of a book titled
The Money Shot, Trash Class and the Making of TV Talkshows.
- She also once worked on the Jerry Springer show.
- I think most people who were in college in the 90s
watched at least some Jerry Springer.
- Me and my roommates would watch Jerry Springer
and just smoke like terrible dirt weed all the time.
[laughing]
- My name is Katie Reif and my first job out of college
was as an associate producer on the Jerry Springer show.
I think it was the car crash quality of it, you know,
the kind of gawking at a car crash thing.
- He just do this to me, no!
- Make it interesting with the sound off
because a lot of people are just flipping through the TV.
You hit the Jerry Springer show,
it's gonna make them wanna stop.
- I'm Richard Dominick and at one time
I was the executive producer of the Jerry Springer show.
Can we back up a little bit?
- In 1991, Dominick is first hired to be just one
of Jerry Springer's half dozen producers.
- When I first started on Springer in Cincinnati,
I didn't know what to expect.
I knew he was a newscaster and he won Emmy awards
for being the most popular newscaster in Cincinnati.
And then all of a sudden this guy came in
and he just looked like a wreck.
His hair was all messed up and he had on a sweater
that was too big and he had sneakers on and jeans.
We started talking and making jokes and he sat down,
he lit a cigar and I was a cigar smoker
and we just hit it off right away.
- What a lot of people don't remember about Jerry Springer
is that Jerry Springer was the mayor of Cincinnati
who literally had to step down from office
because he got caught paying a prost*tute with a check.
- He had written a check to a sex worker
and so he was traced back to that sex worker
and so he had a bit of a scandalous past himself
even when he was a politician.
And so people knew him before the Jerry Springer show.
- You just joined us, this is our first show
and we're putting together people
who haven't seen each other for 35 years.
- Back before I took over the show
when it was a very serious program,
the people running the show, multimedia entertainment,
they go over step by step, word for word
what they wanted him to say.
And he's dressed in a banker suit
and he's got these big stupid glasses on
like Larry King and all those big things.
And his hair was all slicked back
and he looked so uncomfortable.
It was like they had programmed
or were trying to program a robot
because in their head he was Phil Donahue.
- Springer launched his talk show
as a sort of Phil Donahue light.
- People often think about the origins of talk shows
as sort of beginning with Phil Donahue.
He really innovated this format.
He explored reproductive rights, child custody issues,
equal pay, he had the silly moments on there too
but he tended to mix the political, the personal
and entertainment together in a kind of package
that was more socially conscious
than you would sort of see coming up afterwards.
- This audience wants in here.
- Phil Donahue on one occasion to try to contain
and then rule the audience member
who started yelling out questions to the audience.
Phil Donahue literally stepped across a light grid
and put a microphone in a person's mouth.
That's what started the audience
getting an opportunity to speak back.
- Phil Donahue, Phil Donahue, Phil Donahue,
that's all I ever heard, Phil Donahue.
And I'm so tired of hearing Phil Donahue's name.
To the people running the Jerry Springer show,
he was a god to them.
And Jerry didn't wanna be the next Phil Donahue.
I just thought, my god, this isn't right.
This is not the guy.
The guy who I met upstairs on the sixth floor,
he's a TV guy.
People are gonna like that guy.
They're not gonna like this guy.
- Jerry Springer was going to be a serious talk show host.
One of the famous lines he said at that time was,
"You won't see me dancing with the Chippendale dancers."
Well, that turned out to be quite ironic
since that would have been mild
compared to what the show eventually evolved into.
[audience laughing]
- If you go back and look at the original Jerry Springer show,
the original Jerry Springer show was as calm as Phil Donahue
and even calmer than my show.
- We have a nice surprise for you today, okay?
- What?
- You are gonna meet your daughter Sandy,
who you have not seen in 35 years.
Sandy.
[audience applauding]
Sandy.
- When I think back at that first season in Cincinnati,
in my opinion, it was just dreadful, boring,
and he had a million and one cards in his hands.
It was, it just, it wasn't working
and it was obvious it wasn't gonna work.
- For its second season,
multimedia entertainment and NBC-owned studios
team up and relocate the Springer show
from Cincinnati to Chicago.
The move does little to boost their ratings,
but for Richard Dominick, it means a promotion
to executive producer.
- I was asked to take over the show.
So I said, yeah, of course, absolutely.
And they said, we're gonna cancel the show in November.
And this was April.
It was like, ah yeah, yeah.
So that's when we decided, hey,
let's turn the tables on everybody
and let's keep the show on the air.
And if we could stick it to multimedia
and we can make this work
and we can stay on the air past November, great.
It'll be a battle won.
- To turn those tables,
the Jerry Springer show will take its cue
from one of the most brutal episodes of television
ever aired.
In the 90s, the Jerry Springer show
will evolve into a spectacle of violence
and human indignity.
But that inspiration actually starts with this guy.
- Let me tell you the story of Geraldo Rivera.
In 1986, Geraldo Rivera's career had come to a standstill.
He had been a high profile correspondent for ABC News
when Tribune Entertainment approached him
about doing a live special from the Lexington Hotel
in Chicago to uncover whatever hidden treasures
or secrets were in the vault in this hotel
that was once controlled by Al Capone.
The hype was relentless.
For weeks, people were talking about
what's Geraldo gonna find in Al Capone's vault?
And at the final minutes of the special,
they break through the vault walls
and what they find is absolutely nothing.
- All right, we'll be right back
after these commercial messages.
We'll see what we got here.
- No bodies, no treasure, no g*ns, no nothing.
And then the ratings came out the next morning.
And it turned out to have been
the highest rated syndicated special in history.
For an encore, Tribune Entertainment hired Geraldo Rivera
to host a talk show.
That Capone special proved that all sizzle and no steak
could still deliver meaty ratings.
But on his new talk show,
Geraldo decides to see what happens
when you serve up real controversy.
- Fast forward to when the chair incident occurred.
- The show featured a panel of young white supremacist youth
who were sort of pitted against a black activist Roy Innis.
Things got very heated and a fight erupted, a brawl erupted.
This was a shocking moment.
But the ratings went through the roof
and in a way it sort of set the stage for,
gave permission for other shows to kind of follow suit.
- Geraldo got his nose broken
and that became the new standard of outrageous television.
The conflicts, the fighting, the emotion
that was allowed to be presented on daytime TV.
- Many talk shows switched gears by infusing conflict
and topics designed to shock.
- I defy any of the hosts back then to say
that they weren't approaching and trying to do
the most salacious topics that they could possibly do.
And that was all of us.
A lot of people look back and don't remember,
Oprah was the one who put on, for the first time,
she started showing you strippers.
She started showing you, you know, call girls.
She started showing you a segment of society
that no one had ever got a chance to see before.
- As trashiness becomes the new standard,
it becomes clear that Jerry Springer needs to change his image
if he hopes to stay on the air.
And his new executive producer is the perfect person
to provide the makeover.
- We kind of knew we were getting canceled.
So that's when we decided, let's go have some fun.
So right away, boom, we changed everything.
Now we got a chance not to be filled on you.
We had a chance to be Jerry.
In a second, a snap of the fingers,
Jerry went out there and was himself.
Jerry never knew what they were gonna say.
Jerry went with the flow, and that's why Jerry was so good,
and that's why the show worked.
He got rid of everything, all that burden,
those chains they had wrapped around him, gone.
- In 1994, the new and improved Jerry Springer show
hits the airwaves.
- He also told you that, you know,
he was in love with you and he's gonna marry you.
- Bull [beep] b*tch.
[crowd cheering]
- So that was the beginning of it, of the nightmare
of television.
- I happened to be brushing down at her tail end,
and she lifted her tail up and...
[crowd cheering]
There it was in all its glory.
- In the beginning, we did some really marvelous.
I married a horse.
It went out on the air, nine o'clock in the morning
in New York City, and it got pulled immediately
out of National Syndication, and we were almost fine
and closed down for a while.
We did shows like that.
- There was virtually nothing of human depravity
that could be imagined that wasn't considered appropriate
for that show.
- I thought the most outrageous thing I could do
in this lifetime was to have sex with 300 men.
So I did it.
- The Springer show quickly catches up
to the tabloid-y content that the other shows
are experimenting with.
- I'm really a man.
[crowd cheering]
A man who cut off his own male organ.
- But the outrageous topics stop others dead
in their tracks.
- I remember one particular show that the producer
asked me to do, and I was told over and over again,
look, you know, Sally just did it last week,
Phil just did it last week, Oprah just did a piece about it,
you need to do this, and I was like,
I can't stand this topic, and I'll tell you what it was.
The topic was something called infantilism,
where these people used to dress up as babies.
Sally just for ASL did a show where she literally
put people in baby pens and put people in diapers,
literally on her set, and I left fingernail marks
down the hallway going into the studio
because I just didn't feel right about doing this topic,
and I was like, you know, I'm not doing that, period.
They can come out and talk to me,
but I'm not gonna have them dress up like little babies.
- While the theatrics repel some talk show hosts,
Jerry Springer embraces it completely.
- We did the Siamese twins connected to the head,
and one of them's on a gurney, and it had to be more
than just talking to them.
- Been in the presence of--
- So?
- One of them liked country music.
- That we're interested in learning.
- Really, okay, how would you like to perform?
[laughs]
? I'm walking away ?
? I saw a side of you ?
? That I knew was there all along ?
? And that someday ?
- And you had this marvelous piece of television.
- You can draw a line from the freak shows,
touring vaudeville freak shows of the 1930s
to the Jerry Springer show.
There is a direct line there.
They serve the same cultural purpose,
which is for the average person to tune in,
look at these people and go, well, my life's not so bad.
[laughs]
- It was Richard Dominick who brought
not only a new energy to the show,
but a complete lack of morality,
a complete lack of any concern for whether the guests
on the show were being exploited,
or whether the product being put out was even decent
for consumption by audiences.
- It never gets acknowledged that people
who have never been on TV before,
who were never considered important enough to be on TV,
had their moment, had their chance to tell their story.
Does your mom know what you do?
- And then all of a sudden, the numbers were going up,
and suddenly they realized, hey, maybe we got something here.
The two big syndicators that carried us,
they were excited that the numbers were going up.
I didn't care what we were putting on the air.
They're selling advertising and making money,
and they want more.
- The only metric that mattered to Richard Dominick
was the ratings.
He was willing to do anything he could to succeed.
- By its fourth season,
the Jerry Springer show makes a profound switch.
No longer content with what critics call
the freak show voyeurism,
physical fights begin to dominate every episode.
- The fists would start flying,
the chairs would start falling,
before you even knew what was going on.
- Oh my God, they got Clans guys picking up chairs
and throwing them into the audience.
And oh, that lady got up and pulled the wig off
the other lady and started beating her with the wig.
You never saw anything like that before.
- If anyone should be credited with what happened,
it is Richard Dominick.
Jerry Springer was just along for the ride.
Richard Dominick is the guy who drove the car off the cliff.
[crowd cheering]
- OJ Simpson is sitting in the back seat
and he has a g*n at his head.
- If there's one image that defines the shift in media
during the 1990s, it's this.
The slowest high-speed chase ever captured on video
as OJ Simpson fleeced police
in a borrowed white Ford Bronco.
The manhunt and the trial that follow
become a media spectacle.
- The jury deserves to get the truth.
- And break records by pulling in a television audience
of over 150 million viewers.
- Not only was it a media circus,
it was like this tourist attraction for a while.
It was really bizarre with all of the courtroom drama
and the characters that emerged from the courtroom drama.
- If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
- The OJ Simpson trial allowed TV news
to go where it hadn't gone before.
- Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley,
the perfect show business couple.
But in the early hours of this morning,
Hugh Grant was seen by officers
picking up a known prost*tute.
- Celebrity lives and personal lives
and sexual proclivities, it became much more salacious.
- I did not have sexual relations with that woman,
Miss Lewinsky.
- They didn't use the term reality television at that point,
but that is kind of what it was,
sort of like this ongoing observational reality drama.
- It's time to make sense of America's healthcare system.
In those years, Jerry Springer said,
why is it okay for the local news to do that
when all I'm doing is I'm bringing people on,
they're talking about the same thing?
- Who's got the man living with them, me or her?
- What are you doing?
No, don't take your boot off.
- But the Springer show's penchant
for turning personal issues into high stakes drama
soon takes a hard left turn to violence.
- Working behind the scenes first as an intern
and then as a production assistant,
of course I saw plenty of fights on stage.
I mean, it was at that point almost expected.
- The bouncers who were at every show
always had something to do.
- You get people up there and they're telling the story
and when somebody says something,
and man, they get up and they whack 'em.
Women did that a lot.
- You need to stay out of her life
and you need to find your own man.
You're going, oh!
[crowd cheering]
- When two women got up and were angry,
they literally tore the place apart.
- Mary!
- And that happened almost immediately
because when we started to deal with real people,
with real subjects,
the real things that happen in their life,
you've got to expect real emotion.
- It was about putting violence on television.
It was about the unexpected
and it was about drawing a crowd.
Who doesn't stop to look at a car wreck?
You rub two sticks together and you get fire.
So it's quite orchestrated,
but then what's always the spontaneous
sort of authentic part of it is exactly how people react
and how far do they go.
- None of the violence can take place without producers,
hand-picking guests who are willing to unleash their rage
on national television.
- It's always, oh, they put on trash people.
They weren't trash people, they were good people.
Oh, they put on sluts and this and dope addicts
and stop it already.
These are good, solid people who came on the show
and probably had more guts than half of the people
out there who criticized them at the time.
- Sometimes you would get people who genuinely thought
that they didn't have any other option,
except for trying to resolve it this way.
- Some people were honestly just messy, messy people
who loved drama and wanted a free trip and wanted attention.
- They would fly in people from all over the country.
They would put them up in hotels,
give them a room service allowance.
They would drive them by limo to the studio
and this could be the biggest day of their lives.
- When all the guests arrived in Chicago,
you'd kind of get them settled in their rooms
and then you'd take them out to dinner.
I was on the family drama team and a big part of hanging out
with the guests was you were kind of making sure
that they didn't get too drunk to show up
to the show the next day.
They must've had a problem with that in the past
because I remember being explicitly told
to make sure they don't get too drunk
and then the next day they would come into the office
and meet the producer and the producer is the one
who would get them all riled up.
Tell them you need to confront her,
you need to clear the air,
you need to tell everybody the truth
and all this kind of stuff and the producer's one
that would get them all ready to come out on stage.
- Everything that producers do from the moment
they put the feelers out to find guests,
finding other people to go on the show with them,
everything is really geared toward getting the money shot
and by that I mean this sort of expression of raw emotion
on the part of the guest.
- Say that we were still trying to be friends, please.
- This could be dissolving into tears,
this could be erupting in rage and disbelief
when you find out your boyfriend of seven years
has been sleeping with your best friend
and that's what producers wanna see.
That is the goal, right,
of ordinary people performing on television during this era.
The money shot is that moment when a guest loses,
they're cool.
- One of my most memorable days on Jerry Springer
is my producer hands me a list of groceries
and some cab fare and says,
go buy everything on this list at the store
and it was all Thanksgiving foods.
This was an episode where we had a family
that was having some kind of drama,
they sat all the members of this family
down at a big long table
with all this soft throwable food in front of them
and it was a food fight.
- You know what, I'm not losing weight for you.
[crowd cheering]
- I remember one of the women in the family
was just really upset,
she was really upset with how this was going
and it was kind of dawning on her
what was really happening
and during the commercial breaks,
I remember standing there asking her
to please not touch her face
and please not wipe the food off of her face for continuity
and she's like very emotionally upset,
she's realizing what's happening,
she's humiliated and I couldn't even offer her
any kind of sympathy or comfort in that moment
because my main job at that moment was to make sure
that she looked as ridiculous as possible
when the commercial break was over.
That was the moment I felt the absolute worst to be there.
- One of my jobs was to help make sure
that the guests left the stage
and went to the green room
and got their things together
and there's the saying in the industry,
bring them in by limo, send them home by cab
'cause now that they've delivered
what you need them to do,
they, you know, let's get them out the door.
- With "The Springer Show" grabbing headlines
by getting humiliating money shots out of its guests,
other shows scramble to keep up.
- Your shot.
- "The Jenny Jones Show" succeeds
when one guest makes front page news
when he murders another guest.
- Well guess what, it's Scott that has the crush on you.
- You lied to me.
[audience laughing]
- In the 90s, personal conflict becomes a staple
of daytime talk and no one hits below the belt like Springer.
That is until Jenny Jones pushes one of her guests too far.
- Now which of these ways would you choose
to reveal your secret crush on someone?
A, would you write that person a letter?
B, would you tell the person in private
in case he rejects you?
Or C, would you tell that person that you're g*y
and you hope he is on national television?
[audience cheering]
- There was a man who was asked to come on
"The Jenny Jones Show" and someone was going
to reveal a secret crush to him,
and then it turned out to be another man
who we already knew.
And this had kind of been going on off camera already
where the one guy was kind of aggressively
pursuing the other guy and he wasn't interested.
And then it elevated to a new level
when it was on national television.
- Did you have any idea that he liked you this much?
- No, no, no.
- I did not.
- Can you tell us what your status is?
I mean, are you involved with anybody?
- No, but I am definitely heterosexual, I guess you could say.
[audience cheering]
- Three days later, the person who was the object
of that crush m*rder*d the guest.
- He goes home and he sees a note written by Scott
that if you really wanna get it off,
I'm the only one who has the right tool.
- The show didn't actually even air.
It was a taping and it was a couple of days
after the taping that Jonathan Schmidt k*lled Scott Amador.
- His brother is dead.
- But because they're both men
and Schmidt did not identify as g*y,
he felt humiliated by the admission.
There was a lot of debate about,
well, was Jenny Jones really responsible?
- Jenny Jones is called to testify
and is questioned about her demeanor on the show
and how she seemed to relish in Jonathan's discomfort.
- Did you ever think that if you didn't go
for that extra little setup
to pull that last bit of emotion out,
that maybe this terrible tragedy,
this terrible tragedy which brings us together today
wouldn't have occurred?
- I don't know what you're talking about.
- On the stand, she had very little to say.
- The whole industry in some ways, I think,
had a certain liability.
- I think it was the idea that it could have happened
on any of these shows and it happened
to be the Jenny Jones show that it was.
There was a re-examination
of what was going on with the format.
Are these ambushes right?
Is it moral?
Is it proper?
Are they encouraging violence?
Have they gone too far?
Now it literally became a matter of life and death.
- It was at that point that Oprah really kind of said,
"I'm doing a different kind of show now."
And not coincidentally,
she became much more focused on celebrity guests.
- The m*rder doesn't just make Oprah clean up her act.
Montell, Jenny Jones, even Geraldo
decided to change directions.
- You had everybody running like chickens without a head.
And one that really gets me is Geraldo.
The biggest.
Here he's got a show called "Geraldo"
and he's trying to do what we're doing
and he thinks he's got his cool and he's being who he is
and then all of a sudden that happens.
Jenny Jones, boom.
And all of a sudden the next day,
it's the Geraldo Rivera show.
And now he's wearing his glasses
because he's gonna do an intelligence show.
And he looked like a moron, okay?
Geraldo, if you happen to see this,
you looked like a moron because you're a hypocrite.
And all of a sudden you ran scared.
- Richard Dominic looked at the same set of facts
and he went in the opposite direction.
He decided if all of these other talk shows
are gonna pull back from the outrageousness,
we're gonna move forward.
- Let's hear what Anna has to say about this.
The other woman, here's Anna.
[audience cheering]
- Jerry Springer continued on doing what he does best,
which is to provide a cultural cartoon
for the entertainment of viewers.
- When the Jenny Jones m*rder happened,
it rocked television.
Honestly, did not rock us at all.
- In fact, the Springer show's ratings soared.
And they claimed the number two spot
in daytime television right behind Oprah.
But not everyone is impressed by Jerry's success
and soon the media start pinning the Jenny Jones m*rder
on both Springer and Richard Dominic.
- People turned on our show as if we did it.
Before Jenny Jones, she was baking muffins.
Now she was trying to imitate us.
And then we got to blame for it.
We never brought somebody on and surprised them.
We didn't.
We said, this is gonna happen or this is gonna happen
and you gotta be okay with it.
And if they even for a moment had to think about it,
I wouldn't put them on.
We're not gonna allow that to happen.
- Blaming Springer for the Jenny Jones m*rder
does little to change their content.
[g*ns firing]
But when two teenagers sh**t up their high school
in Colorado, people question where they might have learned
such violence.
The answer that many come up with is daytime talk
and it's reigning king, Jerry Springer.
- There was a point where the Jerry Springer show became
the villain.
- It's double action so it's still loaded.
- By the late 90s, mass shootings involving teenagers
are on the rise.
- Got some people in there.
[g*ns firing]
- Between 1996 and 1999,
eight separate middle school shootings rocked the nation.
Culminating in the mass m*rder at Columbine.
- Shot being fired, the police officer standing
at the door and it looks like he's--
- Rather than blaming lack of g*n control,
both media pundits and religious officials
turned their attention towards Jerry Springer.
- Things started to turn more dark in the United States
when mass shootings in schools, Columbine.
I think we all had to reassess where America was headed
and whether any of these programs, including Jerry's,
had anything to do with it.
- You had this horrible Columbine m*ssacre at a school
with these two cuckoos who walked in with g*ns
and raincoats and the next day they're saying
we were responsible.
- There were forces in Chicago, a Catholic priest named
Michael Flager led a protest and actually brought picketers
and petitions and marches to NBC Tower
to protest Jerry Springer and to try to get him off the air.
- Very righteous man.
He got a group of people to picket and making noise
and people were screaming outside of the building
and walking around with picket signs.
Does Springer show his Satan?
We're not Satan.
- I think it would be too difficult to draw a straight line
from what was going on to what occurred
in terms of the actual violence being played out.
But I do believe that shows like Springer dramatized
a coarseness that was pervading society.
- The Springer show was well used to receiving criticism,
especially from religious voices.
It's long been par for the course,
but then Oprah jumps into the fray.
- I don't think that it was a calculated effort
to target Springer, but Richard Dominic still took
her negative comments as a challenge.
- There came a point in the show where the Springer show
was number two in the ratings of daytime.
There was only Oprah ahead of us,
but she started making me angry because she's sitting
on the top of the heap.
And every time I turn around, I hear Oprah said this,
Oprah said that, she says it in the press.
And the only thing I ever said was,
if you wanna save the whales, call Oprah.
If you're sleeping with a whale, call the Jerry Springer show.
But the only thing I ever said publicly,
but to the staff, I said, you know what?
I wanna beat her.
- By 1998, Jerry Springer was number one.
He was still front page news in Chicago
for everything that was going on with the show.
And there were still people who were complaining
about the fights and the violence.
That was when it was at its peak.
Into that comes the Chicago City Council.
- If it's a crime to slap your wife at Sox Park
or Soldier Field, then it's a crime to slap your wife
on the stage at the Springer show.
- An alderman named Ed Burke decided to go after Springer
on the basis of the fights
that were being shown on the program.
Basically, his case was, there's only two possibilities.
If those fights are real, then that is as*ault,
and the Chicago police ought to be arresting those people.
If those fights are not real, then it's fraud,
and it shouldn't be allowed to be shown on television.
- If I was to suddenly grab this book
and walk up to you and smack you with it,
- Yeah?
- Would you think that I was committing a violation?
- You want him to do it?
[laughing]
- Jerry, much to his credit, showed up and testified
without being subpoenaed and made a mockery
of the whole thing.
I mean, basically, he treated it all as a joke
because the fact is, it really was a joke.
- Let me ask the question.
Would you like me to have a reporter
with those people? - Read the question
back to you. - Yes.
- It calls for a yes or no answer.
- Yes, would you please do it,
'cause at least she won't be yelling.
Go ahead.
[laughing]
- It was purely for headlines.
It was pure grandstanding in the classic political sense,
and Jerry Springer, who was a politician
before he ever got into television,
knew that better than anyone.
- They asked him if he wanted to make a statement,
and he said, "I am not now,
"nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party."
And we just laughed at them.
- It was a wonderful performance.
He was not concerned at all
that this was going to amount to anything
of any substance at all.
- Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!
- The negative media attention
bolsters Springer's ratings even more.
But his particular strain of trash aesthetics
will give birth to a new kind of entertainment,
one that will change the country.
- Pay attention, please!
- During the '90s, Jerry Springer
endures criticism from almost every angle,
but through it all, he survives.
In fact, he thrives.
To his fan base, he can do no wrong.
- It's hard to describe today
just how big he was for the few years
that he was on top.
He wrote a best-selling book,
he recorded a song.
Even the outtakes of the show sold millions of copies.
He became such a huge cultural and social phenomenon
that it far exceeded the show.
- But as the decade comes to an end,
talk shows like Springer's
start to see their ratings decline.
- I think it just had its heyday.
I mean, you can't sustain for more than a decade
that kind of programming unless you have more innovation.
- How many times can I watch somebody rip off a wig
and then hit the gal?
You can only be shocking for so long
and then you need to be heading
and you're not gonna get that.
- Instead of public executions,
a new type of entertainment hits our screens,
one that's been spliced from the exact same DNA
as trash TV.
- You are tripping, you are tripping, prostitution wh*re,
you are [beep] engaged, 19 times?
Who the [beep] are you?
[beep]
- Springer opened the can of craziness and wild things.
- Reality shows are the bird that evolved
from the dinosaur of 90s talk shows.
A lot of the tactics are the same,
particularly shows like The Real Housewives.
Is definitely an outgrowth of Jerry Springer
because people wanna see people fight on those shows too.
- No ifs, ands, or buts.
Daytime TV was the beginning and laid the groundwork
for what we call reality TV.
It gives people the same vicarious, salacious thrill
that they were getting at looking at someone else.
- Part of reality TV's mass appeal is that it blurs
the line between truth and fiction,
making it so powerful a medium that it ends up
transforming American politics.
- There's a lot of things that go into the mix
of a cultural system that would end up
electing a reality star as a president,
who behaved, in my view, worse than any Jerry Springer guest.
- Everything is sort of confrontational, loud,
in your face, brash, conflictual.
Reality television might have given him a platform for that.
- If you took what we did in the 1990s
and showed it today in its entirety,
the cancel culture people's heads would explode.
It's not gonna work because Jerry was in the 90s
and that's when it shocked everybody.
[crowd chanting]
- We have to say this about Jerry.
For all his faults, he was the first to admit
that he was doing a stupid talk show
and that there was no more significance to it than that.
- Somebody said, "Were you ever offended
"by any of the guests on the show, by something they did?"
And the answer was, "No."
When the man said, "I married a horse,"
I said, "I'd love to see a picture of the bride."
[upbeat music]
[upbeat music]
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