In the late 90s, Springer’s talkshow dominated the ratings with some of the most controversial stories ever told. It certainly wasn’t easy to make – but what do its producers think of it now?
Is there anything The Jerry Springer Show wouldn’t do? The shock talkshow, an arena for people in love triangles to come to blows, also featured incest, white supremacists and a man who married his horse. “I did pitch a guy having an affair,” says Tobias Yoshimura, one of the show’s producers. “He was a necrophiliac. That one got shot down pretty quickly.” Perhaps not so much for matters of taste, as for the practicalities of television and any hopes of a good fight scene. The third guest – the shock reveal of the affair partner – says Yoshimura with a wry smile, “would have to be a cadaver. So that was the step too far.”
The Jerry Springer Show, which ran from 1991 before finally fizzling out in 2018, started as a mundane daytime talkshow, fronted by Springer, a mild-mannered news anchor and former mayor of Cincinnati. Threatened with cancellation because of its terrible ratings, its new executive producer, Richard Dominick, took it in a sensationalist direction. It became a phenomenon and at its height in the late 90s, its ratings were bigger than Oprah Winfrey’s. Morality campaigners held protests outside the studios; many others claimed it had corroded American society. Take it further and you could argue that it is (partly) responsible for everything from the worst of reality TV to the way people behave on social media and even the rise of Donald Trump. “He took my show and brought it to the White House,” Springer said in 2019.
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