HERE COME DA JUDGE
Vinay Menon on former talk show host returning to TV,
After earning the title “Godfather of Trash TV,” Jerry Springer is returning to the dial next year with a gavel and black robe. Judge Jerry? That designation seems as incongruent as President 6ix9ine or Nobel Laureate Cher. But in the theatre of the absurd that is 2018, get ready to hear these unsettling words: All rise, the Honourable Judge Jerry now presiding…
Strange days, indeed. Imagine getting into a small claims dispute over, say, rent payments or damage to your parked Kia, and entering a courtroom to see the smirking face of a bespectacled lout who routinely dragged culture into a fringe gutter with TV episodes such as “Stripper Sex Turned Me Straight,” “In Love With My Nephew,” “Big Time Brother Beatdown,” “Messy Threesomes,” “Transgender Babydaddy Drama,” “Scoring With Three Sisters” and “Catfished by a Little Person.”
The Jerry Springer Show was a YouTube comments thread before the internet.
It was a modern-day circus inspired by a gladiatorial philosophy.
Judge Jerry? No thanks. That’s like getting financial advice from Johnny Depp or marriage counselling from Tristan Thompson. Say what you will about Judge Judy, but that creepy ice queen never spent nearly three decades of her life exploiting marginalized rubes who were inclined to marry their horses or self-identify as “Kung Fu Hillbillies.”
Judge Wapner never stroked his chin and chuckled with detached glee as his bloodthirsty studio audience chanted —
“Jo-seph! Jo-seph! Jo-seph!” — and fists and chairs started flying onstage, all for the cheap amusement of viewers with too little book smarts and too much time on their hands. The Jerry Springer Show was never about the rule of law; it was always about the rule of mockery. Period. And the most dispiriting part was that Springer — a lawyer with surprisingly sensible political and social insights who once served as the mayor of Cincinnati — always knew better.
He understood the wrecking ball he was piloting, week after week, year after year. He just didn’t care about the collateral damage. If exploiting the desper- ate or those with obvious mental disorders — go back and count the number of episodes devoted to people who cut off parts of their bodies — was a way to make a killing, he was ready to make it, no questions asked. The “controversies” here affected less than 0.00001 per cent of the population. The people on his shows might as well have been extraterrestrials. But the dark illusion was in hinting these weirdos lived next door. They could be someone you know. For a while in the ’90s, Springer was more popular than Oprah. He claimed his show was just harmless “escapism.”
That was never true. It was a harbinger of what was to come: ritualized humiliation as a form of entertainment. His show did more to debase discourse and spread a reflexive fear of others than all other daytime talk shows combined.
Conspiracy theories, moral extremism, social judgment, guilty-until- proven-innocent, outrage mobs, ingroup bias, ridicule as programming, reflexive intolerance, irrational disdain — The Jerry Springer Show pioneered or perfected so much of the social garbage that is ubiquitous today.
And this is precisely why every decent person should be troubled about the prospect of Jerry Springer in a judicial role, especially one that’s made for TV. If he manages to subvert the courtroom genre the way he disfigured daytime gabfests, he’s likely to drag culture into a new gutter at a time when we can’t afford any more forays into the bubbling slime. We are Springered out.
On Monday, NBC Universal announced plans for Judge Jerry with a bunch of boilerplate yawns. The new show will “merge Springer’s talent for connecting with people” with “his incredibly relatable and funny personality.”
The company is “so happy” to forge a new partnership with Springer, who “is a proven TV icon with a dedicated and broad fan base.”
I don’t know about “broad,” but the “dedicated” segment seems unlikely to embrace a court show that doesn’t involve a new formula of ridicule and mockery. The Jerry Springer Show never really changed its cynical ways over 27 years. But then the real world caught up with it in the gutter and made it redundant.
“For the first time in my life, I am going to be called ‘honourable,’” said Springer, in a statement on Monday. “My career is coming full circle and I finally get to put my law degree to use after all these years.”
It sounds noble. But perhaps Springer should first apologize for nearly three decades of trash and the cultural stench he left behind this summer. Even the most incompetent judge would find him guilty of making the world a terrible place.
The Jerry Springer Show was never about the rule of law; it was always about the rule of mockery