Audiences still cry ‘Jerry’ 4 000 episodes later
IN THE early 1990s, a television talk show host with a carbon-copy Phil Donahue style but dismal ratings was walking with his producer down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. They had a problem.
At the time, dozens of similarly formatted programmes were clawing for the same prize – the attention of middleaged women sitting in front of a TV during the afternoon – or at least the scraps of that prize left behind by Oprah Winfrey. She reigned supreme. Competition was fierce. It was hard to stand out.
Then the host had a eureka moment that changed television for good.
“Let’s go young,” Jerry Springer told his producer, suggesting his eponymous talk show lower its sights to a younger demographic of high schoolers and college students.
“We said, from now on, young people in the audience… young people on stage, young subject matter,” Springer explained to Rosie O’donnell in 2012. “Well, young people are just much wilder in their personal lives, much more open, much more emotional. So the show started to go crazy.”
Ever since, Springer has been the reigning king of daytime talk, a lowbrow PT Barnum who took the format from Phil Donahue’s sober issues-oriented discussions to fistfights, paternity tests and episodes with titles like I’m a Breeder for the Klan and I Married a Horse. Millions watched. Critics attacked, blasting the show for trafficking in exploitation, sexism and transphobia.
“Let’s face it: the show deserves critics,” Springer admitted to CNN in 1998, the year his ratings finally topped Winfrey, according to the New York Times. “It’s a stupid show on television.”
Now, after 27 seasons and nearly 4 000 episodes, Springer’s television run could be ending. After months of cancellation rumours, this week the 74-year-old host discussed the programme’s fate with ET’S Kevin Frazier. “We’ve stopped production of the show,” Springer said, adding that a contract with the CW Network means older shows will continue to air. A handful of new episodes that have already been taped will also run in the future.
But there are no plans to shoot new episodes. “Whenever you make changes, it’s sad,” Springer told Frazier.
The news has prompted fans and haters alike to chew over the bawdy show’s legacy. But any look back at Springer’s tenure shows how much the host has not only changed television but pop culture.
If you chopped and diced Springer’s own life into Springer-like episodes, you would get an interesting mix – maybe not I Married a Horse, but the record of an eclectic time:
●“He Was Born In a London Tube Station During the Blitz.”
● “Working In the Last Months of the Bobby Kennedy Campaign.”
●“Mayor at 33.”
●“I was Caught Paying a Prostitute with a Personal Cheque.”
Springer’s parents barely escaped the Holocaust. They were Polish Jews who left for London just before the Nazis closed the borders. He was born in London in 1944, and when Springer was 5 his family emigrated to New York City. After college at Tulane University, he received his law degree from Northwestern in 1968. A meeting with Robert F Kennedy prompted Springer to join the New York senator’s presidential campaign as a campus organiser.
Springer was staying at the University of Cincinnati when he got a phone call on June 6 that Kennedy had been assassinated in California. The news filled the young political operative with “disbelief, horror”, he would tell Rosie O’donnell decades later. “You can’t love someone you don’t know, but I did.” - The Washington Post