Jerry Springer: the man who changed US television for better and worse

I’ll never forget the time I went to a taping of The Jerry Springer Show with two of my closest high school pals. This was back in the 1990s, when Chicago was the center of the talkshow universe and Springer and Oprah were the hottest tickets in town. My parents, bless, wouldn’t have batted an eye if I said I was going to see the queen of daytime. But the king of sleaze? Up to now they wonder how I ever got their permission.

Somewhere in my childhood bedroom, the ticket is sitting in a drawer with the actual episode title – not that the show headings stopped TV Guide from calling it “the worst show in the history of television”. Despite producers’ yeoman efforts to class up the spectacle for censors, it was the same show every day: somebody cheated, somebody didn’t know and we’re all about to find out. This one was no different – and still some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

Springer taped at NBC Tower, which meant you had to walk past a proper television operation to queue up for Jerry’s carnival. When we finally made it on to an industrial-themed set, with its giant fan slowly turning at stage left, it was so much smaller than I had expected. We were seated right behind Steve, the ex-cop turned security chief who’d emerge as a kind of sidekick and fan favorite. Turns out, calling the show’s toll-free hotline not only netted gratis admission, but the best seats in the house.

The spectacle itself didn’t disappoint. The confessions were sotto voce, the reactions were big and the reveals were gasp-inducing. I’m pretty sure at least one chair was thrown, prompting Steve to spring from his seat to break up the ruckus. Through it all, we charged our fists and chanted “Jair-REE! Jair-REE!” while the man at the center of it all couldn’t have appeared less excitable.

That was the irony of Springer, who died on Thursday at age 79, always so serious when the situation was anything but. Perhaps that’s because when his syndicated talkshow first launched in 1991, he was styled to be almost a diet flavor of daytime king Phil Donahue, down to the wire-rimmed specs. But where Phil was an incubated media personality, the London-born Springer actually had a serious career in politics.

He began at 25 as an advisor on Robert F Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign and was taking the bar exam in Cincinnati when he learned that his political hero had been gunned down in Los Angeles. Recalling the tragedy years after his talkshow fame, Springer would call RFK ”the most authentic person I’d ever met in politics” – and it was hard to miss the Kennedy influence in young Jerry’s mid-Atlantic delivery and Senator Ted-like hair helmet.

In 1971, Springer ran for a congressional seat in Ohio and lost – but still made it to the Capitol to testify before a Senate judiciary committee in favor of lowering the voting age, which prompted a ratifying of the 26th amendment. That same year, he’d win a seat on Cincinnati’s city council only to resign the position three years later after being caught for soliciting in an FBI sting. But the responsibility that he took in that moment, facing up to the camera and admitting his transgressions, was such an outlier in the Watergate era that Springer’s constituents couldn’t help but take heart – and re-elect him in a landslide the next year.

Other than a fiat turn as Cincinnati mayor, Springer was nonetheless deemed too tainted and unfit for higher office. More recently, when Springer had flirted with running for Ohio governor or one of the state’s US Senate seats, Democrats and Republicans could never embrace a guy too many blame for dragging American culture into the sewer. (An unserious candidate, they’d call him.) But Springer was less of an instigator than he was a product of the times. Morton Downey Jr and Geraldo Rivera were trafficking in trash TV long before The Jerry Springer Show went national. Even Oprah wasn’t above devoting a show to “daughters who get pregnant by their fathers … and have the babies”.

What’s more, Springer started out doing a show about politics – a kind of extension of his sharp-tongued local TV news op-eds. But when producer Richard Dominick took over in 1994, he junked that format for episodes on adultery, race wars and other controversies. Before long, the show was not only surging past Oprah in the ratings but spurring Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams and other rivals to shake up their formats, too. Verily, the era of tabloid TV was born.

But what Springer appreciated better than them all was the theater in the absurdity – what, with its Aristotelian motifs, Greek chorus and the threat of violence always hanging in the air. The Springer show was bound to resonate with high schoolers, given Shakespeare’s prominence on the curriculum at the time. What’s more, it’s hardly surprising anymore when Corey Holcomb and other comedians who cut their teeth in Chicago share stories about how they were invited on the show back in the day to help them manufacture trouble.

But Springer didn’t just expose my generation to classic conflict through lowbrow hijinks. For many, he was the first introduction to gay people, to trans culture – to communities still on the fringe and pushing for mainstream rights and respect. He proved dramatic telly could be manufactured by show producers. Steve got his own show! Springer’s hand in the rise of reality TV is unmistakable. Without him, Mona Scott-Young isn’t churning out seasons of Love & Hip Hop, and my dad isn’t asking me, “How can you watch this stuff?”

And then he’ll stop and remember, “you’re the same guy who saw Jerry Springer live”. Of course Springer was on screen plenty after his show’s 27-year run closed, from Question Time to the Masked Singer. But the chatshow is his legacy and not a half bad one for TV’s ultimate straight man. I’d give anything to go back.