The TV host who ran a circus of sleaze
Jerry Springer 1944–2023
Jerry Springer was the king of trash TV. Over 27 years and 4,000 episodes, The Jerry Springer Show brought a parade of humanity’s worst impulses into American living rooms. There were cheating spouses, white supremacists, and feuding relatives. There were episodes with titles like “Threesomes With Grandma,” “I Married a Horse,” and “Stripper Wars.” Secrets were revealed, wrongdoers confronted, and quite often fists and chairs flew, with bouncers racing to separate combatants as the audience chanted “Jer-ry, Jer-ry.” A genial character, Springer maintained a wry calm amid the fray. Regularly lambasted for debasing the culture, he defended his show as escapist entertainment, but acknowledged he wouldn’t watch it himself. Given the choice, “I would have politics on every day,” he said in 1998. “But I was hired to be a ringleader of a circus.”
He was born in London to Jewish refugees who had fled Germany, said The Hollywood Reporter. When he was 4, the family moved to New York, where he grew up. After earning a law degree from Northwestern University, he took a job with a Cincinnati firm and at age 27 was elected to the city council. That’s where “the political and the prurient” first collided in his career: He was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had patronized a brothel (he was caught because he had paid by check). “Nothing if not resilient,” Springer was re-elected a year later, said The New York Times. He served as mayor for a year in 1977, then turned to TV and had a run as a popular news anchor. When The Jerry Springer Show launched in 1991, it was meant to be a serious, “issue-oriented program.” But when ratings sagged, the producers shifted to “tawdriness,” and then “the shock value just kept going up.” By 1998, Springer had 8 million viewers. They even made a musical about the show: Jerry Springer—The Opera.
The passions unleashed on the show could “have serious consequences,” said NPR.org. One woman was killed by her ex-husband after they appeared on an episode, while a man whose fiancée admitted to cheating on him on the show later killed himself. Springer had no illusions about his legacy. “I’ve been virtually everything you can’t respect: a lawyer, a mayor, a major-market news anchor, and a talk-show host,” he told Northwestern law school graduates in 2008. “Pray for me. If I get to heaven, we’re all going.”