Few television shows have been as divisive or have as complicated a legacy as The Jerry Springer Show. For 28 seasons the show was home to some of the most chaotic, vulgar, and unabashedly obscene content ever produced. Now, a new two-part Netflix documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action revisits what TV Guide once called “the worst TV show of all time.” Told through interviews with the show’s former producers (Springer himself declined to be interviewed for the documentary before he died in 2023) Fights, Camera, Action traces the show’s humble beginnings and its controversial rise to becoming the pop culture phenomenon and ratings juggernaut that would eventually, albeit temporarily, dethrone Oprah Winfrey.
When The Jerry Springer Show first premiered in 1991, it failed to make a splash. Springer, a newsman and former mayor of Cincinnati didn’t exactly stand out in an already saturated landscape of television talk show hosts ruled by the reigning Queen Oprah. It’s hard to believe the show that eventually became the raunchy circus it did, initially had a more serious tone. In an archive interview Springer reveals his early goals for the show saying, “I want them to say after watching the show that they learn something about life that they didn’t know before, and Jerry didn’t get in the way of the telling of that story.” Media critic Robert Feder describes the show’s early days as “respectful, but not compelling.” When the show relocated to Chicago and hired former tabloid headline writer Richard Dominick, the show found its footing and its audience. One particular episode entitled Klanfrontation, featuring members of the Klu Klux Klan facing off against Irv Rubin, head of the Jewish Defence League. It wasn’t long before the confrontation devolved into a violent mélange of fisticuffs. “I don’t think anyone knew how crazy that show was going to be,” says former producer Toby Yoshimura, “It was chaos, just crazy. Like an atom bomb going off…it was horrible” Executive producer Richard Dominick saw it another way. “It was brilliant,” he recalls. It was at this point the show found its new direction: the more outrageous, the better. “At that point” says fellow former producer Annette Grundy, “Richard was like, game on.” And that game was to encourage as many battles, brawls, and airborne chairs as possible. As former Chicago Sun Times writer Feder says, “it became a talk show with very little talk. It was all about the yelling and the fighting.”
To say the show was lowbrow is an understatement but the lower the show sank in terms of subject matter, the higher its ratings climbed and the thirstier the crowd who famously chanted “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” every episode became for trash television. One particular episode, featuring a man who had married a horse and who proceeded to make out with said horse on stage, drew the ire of critics and media pundits who were asking how low television could go. In an archival interview in the doc, Springer defends his eponymous show saying, “in a free society, the media should reflect all elements of that society, not just the mainstream.” During a 1999 Chicago City Council hearing on violence in television, Springer testified, “If I thought for one second that my show would be hurtful to society I wouldn’t do it. It’s a television show. We will all survive it.”
But not everyone, in fact, survived. The documentary covers a particular low point in the show’s legacy that ended in a violent murder. After appearing on Springer in a love triangle episode, in July of 2000, Florida woman Nancy Campbell-Panitz was killed by her estranged husband Ralf Panitz the day their episode aired. The victim’s son appears in the documentary and believes his mother was lured on to the show under false pretenses. “I don’t think my mother had any idea what she was walking into,” he tells documentary director Luke Sewell, “it’s pretty obvious they were there to ambush her.” The show’s former producers deny any wrongdoing in the tragedy. In an archive interview Springer himself calls it, “a very, very sad event but it has nothing to do with the show.”
The Jerry Springer Show continued to air for another 18 years after the murder and the show remained audaciously trashy until the end. When Jerry Springer died in 2023, he left behind a complicated legacy with some believing he was responsible for the downfall of society and his supporters believing it’s not that serious – it was just a TV show. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The show certainly didn’t contribute to the betterment of society, but whether it had a direct hand in any downfall is debatable. As is revealed in the documentary, no one involved in The Jerry Springer Show seemed to at all be deluded that they were doing anything other than providing smutty and salacious entertainment. “We’re not problem solvers,” says former EP Dominick, “we’re going to give you the chance to come on, get it all out, but we’re not going to help you.” Adds Grundy, “if you come on this show you’re going to do what we expect you to do.” Springer himself never purported to be anything other than the leader of his vulgar, chaotic three-ring circus, never feigning to be a “legitimate” talk show host and he seemed to be at peace with that. But, as we see in an undated archive interview featured in part two of the doc, the late host says, and whether he’s being serious or not is open to interpretation, “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for everything I did on television. I really ruined the culture…I just hope hell isn’t that hot.”
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is currently streaming on Netflix.
