There have been so many parodies since that it is strange to go back to the real thing. And even stranger to find that the parodies never got out of the starting blocks. Where, after all, can you go when the original Jerry Springer Show showcased Diaper Bob, aired the Stripper Wars episode, ran stories such as “I cut off my manhood”, “My wife’s sleeping with my aunt” or “I’m pregnant by my brother” and – perhaps most famously – brought on Mark and his horse wife Pixel (together for 10 years, married for five – he left his human family for her) to the most delighted gasps yet from Springer’s enthusiastically appalled audience.
Such are the highlights – if that word can be used for a show that was blamed for ushering in a new era of cultural degradation – around which the documentary about the most notorious chatshow in television history is built. Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action assembles key players from the time, focusing mainly on its 90s heyday (the show ran, slightly startlingly, until 2018) when it was revolutionised by “diabolical genius” Richard Dominick. He felt himself bound only by law when it came to deciding what could be screened. “If I could execute someone on TV,” he says, “I would.”
Until Dominick’s arrival, the Jerry Springer Show was a quiet, inoffensive thing. Springer was a former councilman and mayor of Cincinnati and a respected figure in local broadcasting; his show dealt in debates about social issues and in gentle reunions between long-lost family members. When NBC bought it and took it national, the ratings this approach yielded would no longer do. Enter Dominick and the slide towards the extreme. He convinced Springer to lighten his personal approach, the audience to get on their feet and chant his name when he arrived on stage and producers to look for more and more bizarre stories that would pull in channel-surfing viewers and keep them there. One of the best and most dedicated hunters was Toby Yoshimura, who turned to drink and cocaine to deal with the stresses of the job and, eventually, the moral compromises it demanded.
What is remarkable in this documentary is the denial and evasion of responsibility that persists, even now, from almost everyone involved in the show who is featured, despite footage of producers whipping guests up into a fury before pushing them on stage, in pursuit of the physical fights that would become synonymous with the show. By and large, the producers remember only the effort of finding guests and the thrill of the ratings. “We’re not trying to help nobody!” scoffs one. “Just hit those numbers!” When another remembers “the Springer triangle” – the largely deprived area from which 75% of guests were drawn – and the blandishments (limos, hotels, meals) used to persuade them on to the show, there is no visible chagrin or shame.
Whether Springer, who died in 2023, ever felt any himself is a matter of debate. Journalist Robert Feder believes “he knew every day of his life that what he was doing was beneath him and beneath his dignity” and considers that everyone “had to know that when guests went home they could have changed their lives for the worse, for ever”. You can see the smooth political operator coming to the fore in Springer whenever he is asked about his involvement, whether he is replying with a deadpan “I don’t want to live in a country that watches my show”, or when he gives with a righteous air in interviews during the peak years of criticism of “trash TV” the response that television “should reflect all aspects of society”. At a Chicago city council meeting about the violence broadcast, he says: “It’s a TV show – we will all survive it.”
Arguably, at least one guest did not. In 2002, Nancy Campbell-Panitz was murdered by her ex-husband the day he watched the episode about love triangles they and his new wife had recorded two months previously. Her son says the producers got Campbell-Panitz there under false pretences and that they refused to pay her air fare home when she failed to fight with the other woman.
From the vantage point of 2025, The Jerry Springer Show may well have harmed TV and wider culture but it looks most like a mere forerunner of the internet, which has obliterated all lesser attempts at racing to the bottom. We would be here, now, whether the show had existed or not. But perhaps fewer vulnerable people would have been hurt or killed before the tool for global depravity arrived. And that, surely, would have been worth something.
• Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is on Netflix now.
