Perspective: When others went low, he went lower. Jerry Springer never met a trashy setup he couldn’t milk for TV, in a genre he didn’t invent but certainly perfected. On his show, he tried the earnest approach. But that’s not what the people wanted.
Cheating spouse reveals. Baby daddy reveals. Teenage stripper reveals. Racists, badasses and brawlers. Springer, who died Thursday at 79, mined the depths and put what he dredged up on his show.
By the best possible reading — the absolute best — Springer’s self-named show was about the aggrieved, the wronged and the dispossessed, a grungy cohort that television had forever tried to ignore until his ilk came along. In that sense, Springer’s endless circus of chaos — the show aired, somewhere, for 27 years — provided a kind of relief to viewers, some proof that their own troubles weren’t nearly as dreadful as those involved in the “Mad Max” spectacle unfolding before them. TV news has long done something similar.But Springer came not to shed light on the lower depths of the human condition but to exploit it.
Springer’s swan dive into TV nihilism seems to have been inspired by another syndicated talk show of the time, hosted by Jenny Jones. When she, too, experienced sagging ratings, Jones dispensed with Oprah-like earnestness and ventured into more lurid subject matter. Bingo: out-of-control teens, strippers, neighbors with beefs against neighbors sent Jones’s viewership spiraling upward.
Springer took Jones’s tabloid sensibilities and refined them like enriched uranium. He went beyond Jones, into “satisfying sight of anYes, there was a market for that on American TV. As much as anyone, Jer-ry! found it.
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