-I thought the most outrageous thing
I could do in this lifetime
was to have sex with 300 men, so I did it.
-In the '90s, talk shows are the most
provocative thing on television.
-You had Oprah, Sally, Phil, Geraldo, myself.
-At one time, there were two dozen talk shows
competing in the marketplace.
-You need to find your own man.
-And the most violent.
-The fists would start flying, the chairs would start falling.
-They literally tore the place apart.
-No boundaries go uncrossed.
-You can't just do this to me!
-None delved as low as Jerry Springer.
-We were the bad guys.
-Until a murder...
-You rub two sticks together and you get fire.
- forces a reckoning.
-It literally became a matter of life and death.
♪♪
[ Internet dial up ]
♪♪
-It is very hard to forgive you for what you did to me,
but I do forgive you.
[ Applause ]
-Daytime talk shows.
No other form of media mirrors
the American psyche quite like them,
-How many women have gone to the grave
never saying anything?
- Today, people are revealing... - And in the 90s,
they flood the airwaves completely.
-At one time, there were two dozen talk shows
competing in the marketplace for essentially the same audience.
-Oprah, Sally, Phil, Geraldo, myself.
Marilu Henner, Charles Perez,
Vanessa somebody that was on "The Cosby Show".
-We all went after those topics
that people had never seen before.
-What starts out as a forum to discuss social issues
and current events quickly devolves into pure spectacle.
- "Oprah" was like the mom show.
And then you had "Maury".
-When it comes to three-year-old Kanaya,
you are not the father.
-That was "You are not the father"
or "You are the father."
Jerry Jones was like more of a social issues kind of thing.
-You never fit in? Shy? Bookworm?
- Yeah. - Geeky, sort of?
-But when it comes to trash TV, one name says it all.
-[ Audience chanting "Jerry!" ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
- "Jerry Springer" was the show where everybody would fight.
-Obviously, she's not doing something right in the bedroom
or he wouldn't be coming... - [ Audience shouts ]
-That was the fighting show, and, like,
and that's kind of what people would tune in for
and it's definitely what people would go
to tapings of the show to see.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-None delved as low as Jerry Springer.
-Here she is... Mom!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-He was the absolute lowest of the low.
-[ Audience chanting "Jerry!"]
-I'm Robert Feder.
I'm a journalist who's been covering the media in Chicago
for more than 40 years.
-[ Audience chanting "Jerry!" ]
-The irony is that there was a point
at which "The Jerry Springer Show"
was the number one talk show in daytime television.
It actually beat Oprah Winfrey at its peak.
And yet it was a talk show where there was very little talking.
People didn't talk.
It was about the conflict and the "Jerry! Jerry!"
I think most people were watching it and saying,
"Who are these people?"
-The guests, especially on a show like "Jerry Springer",
they want to feel like they're leaving a mark on the world,
and, you know, unless they become
a serial killer or sprout two heads,
how are they going to get on television?
-You say you've been a dog.
Who have you been a dog with?
-Her best friend.
-[ Audience cheering ]
-My name's Laura Grindstaff.
I'm a professor of sociology at UC Davis
and I'm the author of a book titled
"The Money Shot:
Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows".
-She also once worked on "The Jerry Springer Show".
-I think most people who are in college
in the '90s watched at least some "Jerry Springer".
-Me and my roommates would watch "Jerry Springer"
and just smoke, like, terrible dirt weed all the time.
[ Laughs ]
My name is Katie Rife, and my first job out of college
was as an associate producer on "The Jerry Springer Show".
I think it was the car crash quality of it,
you know, the kind of gawking at a car crash thing.
-You can't just do this to me! No!
-Make it interesting with the sound off,
because a lot of people are just flipping through the TV.
You hit "The Jerry Springer Show",
it's got to make them want to stop.
I'm Richard Dominick, and at one time,
I was the executive producer of "The Jerry Springer Show".
Can we back up a little bit?
-In 1991,
Dominick is first hired to be
just one of Jerry Springer's half dozen producers.
-When I first started on "Springer" in Cincinnati,
I didn't know what to expect.
I knew he was a newscaster and he won an Emmy Awards
for being the most popular newscaster in Cincinnati.
And then all of a sudden, this guy came in
and he just looked like a wreck. His hair was all messed up
and he had on a sweater that was too big
and he had sneakers on and jeans.
And we started talking and making jokes and he sat down.
He lit a cigar, and I was a cigar smoker,
and we just hit it off right away.
-What a lot of people don't remember about Jerry Springer
is that Jerry Springer was the mayor of Cincinnati
who literally had to step down from office
because he got caught paying a prostitute with a check.
-He had written a check to a sex worker,
and so he was traced back to that sex worker,
and, you know.
So he had a bit of a scandalous past himself,
even when he was a politician.
And so people knew him before "The Jerry Springer Show".
-If you've just joined us, this is our first show,
and we're putting together people
who haven't seen each other for 35 years.
-Back before I took over the show,
when it was a very serious program,
the people running the show, Multimedia Entertainment,
they go over step by step, word for word,
what they wanted him to say.
And he's dressed in a banker suit
and he's got these big, stupid glasses on
like Larry King, you know, those big things.
And his hair was all slicked back
and he looked so uncomfortable.
It was like they had programmed
or were trying to program a robot,
because in their head, he was Phil Donahue.
-Springer launched his talk show as a sort of Phil Donahue lite.
-People often think about the origins of talk shows
as sort of beginning with Phil Donahue.
He really innovated this format.
He explored reproductive rights, child custody issues, equal pay.
He had the silly moments on there, too,
but he tended to mix the political,
the personal, and entertainment together in a kind of package
that was more socially conscious
than you would sort of see coming up afterwards.
-This audience wants in here.
-Phil Donahue, on one occasion
to try to contain an unruly audience member
who started yelling out questions in the audience,
Phil Donahue literally stepped across a light grid
and put a microphone in the person's mouth.
That's what started the audience
getting an opportunity to speak back.
-"Phil Donahue, Phil Donahue, Phil Donahue."
That's all I ever heard. "Phil Donahue."
And I was so tired of hearing Phil Donahue's name.
To the people running "The Jerry Springer Show",
he was a god to them.
And Jerry didn't want to be the next Phil Donahue.
I just thought, "My God, this isn't right.
This is not the guy."
The guy who I met upstairs on the sixth floor...
He's a TV guy.
People are going to like that guy.
They're not gonna like this guy.
-Jerry Springer was going to be a serious talk show host.
One of the famous lines he said at that time was,
"You won't see me dancing with the Chippendale dancers."
Well, that turned out to be quite ironic,
since that would have been mild
compared to what the show eventually evolved into.
[ Laughter ]
[ Audience cheering ]
-If you go back and look at the original "Jerry Springer Show",
the original "Jerry Springer Show"
was as calm as Phil Donahue
and even calmer than my show.
-We have a nice surprise for you today, okay?
You are going to meet your daughter, Sandy,
who you have not seen in 35 years. Sandy?
[ Applause ] Sandy?
-When I think back to that first season in Cincinnati,
in my opinion, it was just dreadful, boring,
and he had a million and one cards in his hands, and...
it wasn't working and it was obvious
it wasn't going to work.
-For its second season,
Multimedia Entertainment and NBC-owned studios team up
and relocate "The Springer Show" from Cincinnati to Chicago.
The move does little to boost their ratings,
but for Richard Dominick,
it means a promotion to executive producer.
-I was asked to take over the show,
so I said, "Yeah, of course, absolutely."
And they said, "We're going to cancel the show in November."
And this was April. It was like, ay-yi-yi.
So that's when we decided, "Hey,
let's turn the tables on everybody
and let's keep the show on the air."
And if we could stick it to Multimedia
and we can make this work
and we can stay on the air past November,
great. It'll be a battle won.
-To turn those tables,
"The Jerry Springer Show" will take its cue from one
of the most brutal episodes of television ever aired.
-In the '90s, "The Jerry Springer Show"
will evolve into a spectacle of violence and human indignity.
But that inspiration actually starts with this guy.
-Let me tell you the story of Geraldo Rivera.
In 1986, Geraldo Rivera's career had come to a standstill.
He had been a high profile correspondent for ABC News
when Tribune Entertainment
approached him about doing a live special
from the Lexington Hotel in Chicago
to uncover whatever hidden treasures
or secrets were in the vault in this hotel
that was once controlled by Al Capone.
[ Gunfire ]
The hype was relentless.
For weeks, people were talking about
what's Geraldo going to find in Al Capone's vault,
and at the final minutes of the special,
they break through the vault walls
and what they find is absolutely nothing.
-All right.
We'll be right back after these commercial messages.
We'll see what we got here.
-No bodies, no treasure, no guns, no nothing.
And then the ratings came out the next morning,
and it turned out to have been the highest rated syndicated
special in history.
For an encore,
Tribune Entertainment hired Geraldo Rivera
to host a talk show.
-That Capone special proved that all sizzle
and no steak could still deliver meaty ratings.
But on his new talk show,
Geraldo decides to see what happens
when you serve up real controversy.
-Fast forward to when the chair incident occurred.
-Okay. [ Cheers and applause ]
-The show featured a panel of young
white supremacists youth, who are sort of pitted against
a black activist, Roy Innis.
Things got very heated and a fight erupted.
A brawl erupted.
-[ Audience shouting ]
-This was a shocking moment.
But the ratings went through the roof,
and in a way, it sort of set
the stage for... gave permission for other shows
to kind of follow suit.
-Geraldo got his nose broken,
and that became the new standard of outrageous television...
The conflicts, the fighting,
the emotion that was allowed to be presented on daytime TV.
-Many talk shows switched gears by infusing conflict and topics
designed to shock.
-I defy any of the hosts back then to say
that they weren't approaching
and trying to do the most salacious topics
that they could possibly do. And that was all of us.
A lot of people, you know, look back and don't remember,
you know, Oprah was the one who put on, for the first time,
she started showing strippers.
She started showing you, you know, call girls.
She started showing you a segment of society
that no one had ever got a chance to see before.
-As trashiness becomes the new standard,
it becomes clear that Jerry Springer
needs to change his image if he hopes to stay on the air.
And his new executive producer
is the perfect person to provide the makeover.
-We kind of knew we were getting canceled,
so that's when we decided, "Let's go have some fun."
So right away, boom, we changed everything.
Now, we got a chance not to be Phil Donahue.
We had a chance to be Jerry.
In a second, the snap of the fingers,
Jerry went out there and was himself.
Jerry never knew what they were going to say.
Jerry went with the flow, and that's why Jerry was so good.
And that's why the show worked.
He got rid of everything,
all that burden,
those chains they had wrapped around him... gone.
-In 1994,
the new and improved "Jerry Springer Show"
hits the airwaves.
-He also told me that, you know, he was in love with you
and he's going to marry you. Bull[bleep], bitch.
[ Audience cheers ]
So that was the beginning of it, of the nightmare of television.
[ Laughs ]
And I happened to be brushing down at her tail end,
and she lifted her tail up and...
[ Audience laughs, groans ]
There it was in all its glory.
[ Audience groans ]
-In the beginning, we did some really marvelous...
"I Married a Horse".
It went out on the air, 9:00 in the morning
in New York City
and it got pulled immediately out of national syndication.
And we were almost fined and closed down for a while.
We did shows like that.
-There was virtually nothing of human depravity
that could be imagined
that wasn't considered appropriate for that show.
-I thought the most outrageous thing I could do
in this lifetime was to have sex with 300 men.
So I did it. [ Chuckles ]
-The Springer Show quickly catches up
to the tabloid-y content
that the other shows are experimenting with.
-I'm really a man.
[ Audience cheers ]
-A man who cut off his own male organ.
-But the outrageous topics
stop others dead in their tracks.
-I remember one particular show
that the producer asked me to do,
and I was told over and over again, "Look, you know,
Sally just did it last week.
Phil just did it last week. Oprah just did a piece about it.
You need to do this." And I was like,
"I can't stand this topic," and I'll tell you what it was.
The topic was something called infantilism,
where these people used to dress up as babies,
and Sally Jessy Raphael had did a show
where she literally put people in baby pens
and put people in diapers literally on her set.
And I left fingernail marks
down the hallway going into the studio
because I just didn't feel right about doing this topic.
And I was like, you know, "I'm not doing that. Period.
They can come out and talk to me,
but I'm not going to have them dress up like little babies."
-While the theatrics repel some talk show hosts,
Jerry Springer embraces it completely.
-We did the Siamese twins connected to the head
and one of them's on the gurney,
and it had to be more than just talking to them.
So one of them liked country music.
"Really? Okay. How would you like to perform?"
-♪ Walking away ♪
♪ I saw a side of you ♪
♪ That I knew was there all along ♪
♪ And that some day... ♪
-And you had this marvelous piece of television.
-You can draw a line
from the freak shows,
touring vaudeville freak shows of the 1930s
to "The Jerry Springer Show".
There is a direct line there.
They serve the same cultural purpose,
which is for the average person to tune in,
look at these people and go, "Well, my life's not so bad."
[ Laughs ]
-It was Richard Dominick who brought
not only a new energy to the show, but
a complete lack of morality, a complete lack of any concern
for whether the guests on the show were being exploited
or whether the product being put out
was even decent for consumption by audiences.
-It never gets acknowledged that people
who have never been on TV before,
who were never considered important enough to be on TV,
had their moment, had their chance to tell their story.
-Does your mom know what you do?
-And then all of a sudden, the numbers were going up,
and suddenly, they realized,
"Hey, maybe we got something here."
The two big syndicators that carried us,
they were excited that their numbers were going up.
They didn't care what we were putting on the air.
They're selling advertising and making money and they want more.
-The only metric that mattered to Richard Dominick
was the ratings.
He was willing to do anything he could to succeed.
-He doesn't love you!
-By its fourth season, "The Jerry Springer Show"
makes a profound switch.
No longer content with what critics
call "freak show voyeurism",
physical fights begin to dominate every episode.
[ Audience cheering ]
-The fists would start flying, the chairs would start falling
before you even knew what was going on.
-Oh, my God. They got Klans guys picking up chairs
and throwing them into the audience.
And oh, that lady got up and pulled the wig off
the other lady and started beating her with the wig.
And you never saw anything like that before.
-If anyone should be credited with what happened,
it is Richard Dominick.
Jerry Springer was just along for the ride.
Richard Dominick is the guy who drove the car off the cliff.
[ Audience cheering ]
-O.J. Simpson is sitting in the back seat
and he has a gun at his head.
-If there's one image that defines the shift
in media during the 1990s, it's this,
the slowest high speed chase ever captured on video
as O.J. Simpson flees police in a borrowed white Ford Bronco.
The manhunt and the trial
that follow become a media spectacle.
-The jury deserves to get the truth.
-And break records by pulling in a television audience
of over 150 million viewers.
-Not only was it a media circus,
it was like this tourist attraction for a while.
It was really bizarre with all of the courtroom drama
and the characters that emerged from the courtroom drama.
-If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
-The O.J. Simpson trial allowed TV news to go
where it hadn't gone before.
-Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley,
the perfect show business couple.
But in the early hours of this morning,
Hugh Grant was seen by officers picking up unknown prostitutes.
-Celebrity lives and personal lives and sexual proclivities.
It became much more salacious.
-I did not have sexual relations with that woman,
Miss Lewinsky.
-They didn't use the term "reality television"
at that point, but that is kind of what it was sort of like,
this ongoing observational reality drama.
-It's time to make sense of America's healthcare system.
-In those years, Jerry Springer said,
"Why is it okay for the local news to do that
when all I'm doing is I'm bringing people on,
they're talking about the same thing?"
-Who's got the man living with her? Me or her?
-[Bleep]
-What are you doing? No. Don't take your boot off.
-Huh?
[ Audience cheering ]
-But "The Springer Show's" penchant
for turning personal issues into high stakes drama
soon takes a hard left turn to violence.
-Working behind the scenes, first as an intern
and then as a production assistant,
of course, I saw plenty of fights on stage.
I mean, it was, at that point, almost expected.
The bouncers who were at every show always had something to do.
-You get people up there and they're telling their story
and somebody says something, they get mad, they get up,
and they whack them.
Women did that a lot.
-You need to stay out of her life,
and you need to find your own man.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-When two women got up and were angry,
they literally tore the place apart.
-[ Audience chanting "Jerry!" ]
-And that happened almost immediately
because when we started to deal with real people,
with real subjects, the real things that happened
in their life, you got to expect real emotion.
-It was about putting violence on television.
It was about the unexpected,
and it was about drawing a crowd.
Who doesn't stop to look at a car wreck?
-You rub two sticks together and you get fire.
So it's quite orchestrated.
But then what's always the spontaneous,
sort of "authentic" part of it
is exactly how people react and how far do they go?
-None of the violence can take place
without producers handpicking guests
who are willing to unleash their rage on national television.
-It's always, "Oh, they put on trash people."
They weren't trash people. They were good people.
"Oh, they put on sluts and this and dope addicts."
Stop it already. We didn't...
These are good, solid people who came on the show
and probably had more guts than half of the people
out there who criticized them at the time.
-[ Audience booing ]
-Sometimes, you would get people who genuinely thought
that they didn't have any other option
except for trying to resolve it this way.
Some people were honestly just messy,
messy people who loved drama
and wanted a free trip and wanted attention.
-They would fly in people from all over the country.
They would put them up in hotels,
give them a room service allowance.
They would drive them by limo to the studio.
And this could be the biggest day of their lives.
-When all the guests arrived in Chicago,
you kind of get them settled in their rooms
and then you take them out to dinner.
[ Glasses clink ]
I was on the family drama team,
and a big part of hanging out with the guests
was you were kind of making sure that they didn't get too drunk
to show up to the show the next day.
They must have had a problem with that in the past,
because I remember being explicitly told
to make sure they don't get too drunk.
And then the next day, they would come into the office
and meet the producer.
And the producer is the one who would get them all riled up,
tell them, "You need to confront her,
you need to clear the air,
you need to tell everybody the truth,"
and all this kind of stuff, and the producer's
the one that would get them all ready to come out on stage.
-[ Audience cheering ]
-Everything that producers do from the moment
they put the feelers out to find guests,
finding other people to go on the show with them,
everything is really geared toward getting the money shot.
And by that, I mean this sort of expression of raw emotion
on the part of the guests.
-Tell me we will still try to be friends, please.
-This could be dissolving into tears.
-This could be erupting in rage and disbelief
when you find out your boyfriend of seven years
has been sleeping with your best friend.
And that's what producers want to see.
That is the goal, right, of ordinary people
performing on television during this era.
The money shot is that moment when a guest loses their cool.
-[ Audience cheering ]
-Yeah, I got your hair, bitch! I got your hair!
That's right, bitch! That's right!
-One of my most memorable days
on "Jerry Springer" is my producer
hands me a list of groceries and some cab fare and says,
"Go buy everything on this list at the store."
And it was all Thanksgiving foods.
This was an episode where we had a family
that was having some kind of drama.
They sat all the members of this family down at a big,
long table
with all this soft throwable food in front of them.
And it was a food fight.
-You know what? I'm not losing weight for you!
-[ Cheers and applause ]
-I remember one of the women in the family
was just really upset.
She was really upset with how this was going.
It was kind of dawning on her what was really happening.
And during the commercial breaks,
I remember standing there asking her
to please not touch her face
and please don't wipe the food off of her face for continuity.
And she's like very emotionally upset.
She's realizing what's happening. She's humiliated.
And I couldn't even offer her any kind of sympathy
or comfort in that moment,
because my main job at that moment
was to make sure that she looked as ridiculous as possible
when the commercial break was over.
That was the moment I felt the absolute worst to be there.
-One of my jobs was to help make sure
that the guests left the stage
and went to the green room and got their things together,
and there's a saying in the industry,
"Bring them in by limo, send them home by cab,"
because now that they've delivered
what you need them to do,
they, you know... Let's get them out the door.
-With "The Springer Show" grabbing headlines
by getting humiliating money shots out of its guests,
other shows scramble to keep up.
-Your son. [ Cheers and applause ]
"The Jenny Jones Show" succeeds
when one guest makes front page news
when he murders another guest.
-We're good friends.
-Well, guess what? It's Scott that has a crush on you.
-You lied to me.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-In the '90s, personal conflict
becomes a staple of daytime talk,
and no one hits below the belt like Springer.
That is, until Jenny Jones pushes
one of her guests too far.
-Now, which of these ways would you choose to reveal
your secret crush on someone?
A... would you write that person a letter?
B... would you tell the person in private
in case he rejects you?
Or C... would you tell that person that you're gay
and you hope he is on national television
in front of millions?
[ Cheers and applause ]
-There was a man who was asked to come on
"The Jenny Jones Show"
and someone was going to reveal a secret crush to him,
and then it turned out to be another man who we already knew.
And this had kind of been going on off camera
already, where the one guy was kind of aggressively
pursuing the other guy and he wasn't interested.
And then it elevated to a new level
when it was on national television.
-Did you have any idea that he liked you this much?
-No, no, no. I did not.
-Can you tell us what your status is?
I mean, are you involved with anybody or...
-No, but I am definitely heterosexual,
I guess you could say.
-Three days later,
the person who was the object of that crush murdered the guest.
-He goes home and he sees a note written by Scott,
that, "If you really want to get it off,
I'm the only one who has the right tool."
-The show didn't actually even air. It was a taping.
And it was a couple of days after the taping
that Jonathan Schmitz killed Scott Amedure.
- his brother's death.
-But because they're both men and Schmitz
did not identify as gay,
he felt humiliated by the admission.
There was a lot of debate about,
well, was Jenny Jones really responsible?
-Jenny Jones is called to testify
and is questioned about her demeanor on the show
and how she seemed to relish in Jonathan's discomfort.
-Did you ever think that if you didn't go for that
extra little set up to pull that last bit of emotion out,
that maybe this terrible tragedy,
this terrible tragedy which brings us together
today wouldn't have occurred?
-I don't know what you're talking about.
On the stand, she had very little to say.
-The whole industry, in some ways,
I think had a certain liability.
-I think it was the idea that it could have happened
on any of these shows
and it happened to be "The Jenny Jones Show" that it was.
There was a reexamination
of what was going on with the foreman.
Are these ambushes right? Is it moral? Is it proper?
Are they encouraging violence? Have they gone too far?
-Now it literally became a matter of life and death.
-It was at that point that Oprah really kind of said,
"I'm doing a different kind of show now."
And not coincidentally,
she became much more focused on celebrity guests.
-The murder doesn't just make Oprah clean up her act.
Montel, Jenny Jones, even Geraldo
decided to change directions.
-You had everybody running like chickens without a head.
The one that really gets me is Geraldo.
The biggest...
Here he's got a show called "Geraldo",
and he's trying to do what we're doing
and he thinks he's cool
when he's being who he is.
And then all of a sudden, that happens.
Jenny Jones... boom.
And all of a sudden, the next day,
it's "The Geraldo Rivera Show",
and now he's wearing his glasses
because he's going to do an intelligent show,
and he looked like a moron.
Okay, Geraldo, if you happen to see this,
you looked like a moron
because you're a hypocrite,
and all of a sudden, you ran scared.
-Richard Dominick looked at the same set of facts
and he went in the opposite direction.
He decided, "If all of these other talk shows
are going to pull back from the outrageousness,
we're going to move forward."
-Let's hear what Anna has to say about this.
The other woman. Here's Anna.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-[Bleep]
-Jerry Springer continued on doing what he does best,
which is to provide a cultural cartoon
for the entertainment of viewers.
-When the Jenny Jones murder happened,
it rocked television.
Honestly, did not rock us at all.
-In fact, "The Springer Show's" ratings soar
and they claim the number two spot
in daytime television, right behind Oprah.
But not everyone is impressed by Jerry's success,
and soon, the media start pinning the Jenny Jones murder
on both Springer and Richard Dominick.
-People turned on our show as if we did it.
Before, Jenny Jones was baking muffins.
Now she was trying to imitate us,
and then we got the blame for it.
We never brought somebody on and surprised them.
We didn't.
We said, "This is going to happen
or this is going to happen, and you got to be okay with it."
And if they even for a moment had to think about it,
I wouldn't put them on.
We're not going to allow that to happen.
-Blaming Springer for the Jenny Jones murder
does little to change their content.
[ Gunfire ]
But when two teenagers shoot up their high school in Colorado,
people question whether they might have learned
such violence.
The answer that many come up with is daytime talk.
And it's raining king, Jerry Springer.
-There was a point where "The Jerry Springer Show"
became the villain.
-It's double action. It's still loaded.
-By the late '90s, mass shootings
involving teenagers are on the rise.
[ Gunshot ]
-Got some beef with me?
[ Gunshots ]
-Between 1996 and 1999, eight separate middle school
shootings rocked the nation,
culminating in the mass murder at Columbine.
-Shot being fired. There's police officers
standing at the door, and it looks like...
-Rather than blaming lack of gun control,
both media pundits and religious officials
turned their attention towards Jerry Springer.
-Things started to turn more dark in the United States
when mass shootings in schools, Columbine,
I think we all had to reassess where America was headed
and whether any of these programs, including Jerry's,
had anything to do with it.
-You had this horrible Columbine massacre at a school
with these two cuckoos
who walked in with guns and raincoats.
And the next day, they're saying we were responsible.
-There were forces in Chicago.
A Catholic priest named Michael Pfleger led a protest
and actually brought picketers and petitions
and marches to NBC Tower to protest Jerry Springer
and to try to get him off the air.
-Very righteous man.
He got a group of people to picket and they're making noise
and people were screaming outside of the building
and walking around with picket signs
that says "Springer Show is Satan". We're not Satan.
-I think it would be too difficult
to draw a straight line from what was going on
to what occurred in terms of the actual violence
being played out,
but I do believe that shows like "Springer" dramatized
a coarseness that was pervading society.
- "The Springer Show" is well used to receiving criticism,
especially from religious voices.
It's long been par for the course,
but then Oprah jumps into the fray.
-I don't think that it was a calculated effort
to target Springer,
but Richard Dominick still took her negative comments
as a challenge.
-There came a point in the show where "The Springer Show"
was number two in the ratings of daytime.
There was only "Oprah" ahead of us,
but she started making me angry
because she's sitting on top of the heap,
and every time I turn around, I hear, "Oprah said this.
Oprah said that."
She says it in the press.
And the only thing I ever said was,
"If you want to save the whales, call Oprah.
If you're sleeping with a whale,
called 'The Jerry Springer Show'."
That's the only thing I ever said publicly,
but to the staff, I said,
"You know what? I want to beat her."
- Give me another shot, Jerry. - Oh, yeah.
-By 1998, Jerry Springer was number one.
He was still front page news in Chicago
for everything that was going on with the show.
And there were still people who were complaining
about the fights and the violence.
That was when it was at its peak.
Into that comes the Chicago City Council.
-If it's a crime to slap your wife
at Sox Park or Soldier Field,
then it's a crime to slap your wife on the stage
at "The Springer Show".
-An alderman named Ed Burke
decided to go after Springer
on the basis of the fights that were being shown on the program.
Basically, his case was there's only two possibilities...
If those fights are real, then that is assault
and the Chicago police ought to be arresting those people.
If those fights are not real, then it's fraud
and it shouldn't be allowed to be shown on television.
-If I was to suddenly grab this book
and walk up to you and smack you with it...
-Yeah?
- would you think that I was committing a violation?
-You want him to do it? [ Chuckles ]
-Jerry, much to his credit,
showed up and testified without being subpoenaed
and made a mockery of the whole thing.
I mean, basically, he treated it all as a joke
because the fact is it really was a joke.
-Let me ask the question. Would you like me to
have a reporter read the question back to you?
It calls for a yes or no answer. - Yes. Would you please do it?
Because at least she won't be yelling. Go ahead.
[ Laughter ]
-It was purely for headlines.
It was pure grandstanding in the classic political sense.
And Jerry Springer,
who was a politician before he ever got into television,
knew that better than anyone.
-They asked him if he wanted to make a statement,
and he said, "I am not now,
nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party."
And we just laughed at them.
-It was a wonderful performance.
He was not concerned at all that this was going to amount
to anything of any substance at all.
-[ Crowd chanting "Jerry!" ]
-The negative media attention bolsters Springer's ratings
even more,
but his particular strain of trash esthetics
will give birth to a new kind of entertainment,
one that will change the country.
-Pay attention. Please.
-During the '90s, Jerry Springer endures criticism
from almost every angle, but through it all, he survives.
In fact, he thrives.
To his fan base, he can do no wrong.
-It's hard to describe today just how big he was
for the few years that he was on top.
He wrote a best-selling book, he recorded a song.
Even the outtakes of the show sold millions of copies.
He became such a huge cultural and social phenomenon
that it far exceeded the show.
-But as the decade comes to an end,
talk shows like Springer's start to see their ratings decline.
-I think it just had its heyday.
I mean, you can't sustain for more than a decade
that kind of programing unless you have more innovation.
-How many times can you watch somebody rip off a wig
and hit the gal?
You can only be shocking for so long.
And then, you know, you need to be beheading,
and you're not going to get that.
-Instead of public executions,
a new type of entertainment hits our screens,
one that's been spliced from the exact same DNA as trash TV.
- I was arrested! - Prostitution whore!
You were [bleep] engaged 19 times?!
You [bleep] bitch!
[Bleep]
[ Dishes crash ]
-Springer opened the can of craziness and wild things.
-Reality shows are the bird that evolved
from the dinosaur of '90s talk shows.
A lot of the tactics are the same.
Particularly shows like "The Real Housewives"
[laughs]
is definitely an outgrowth of Jerry Springer
because people want to see people fight
on those shows, too.
-No ifs, ands, or buts. Daytime TV was the beginning
and laid the groundwork for what we call reality TV.
It gives people the same vicarious, salacious thrill
that they were getting and looking at someone else.
-Part of reality TV's mass appeal
is that it blurs the line
between truth and fiction,
making it so powerful a medium
that it ends up transforming American politics.
-There's a lot of things that go into
the mix of a cultural system
that would end up electing a reality star
as a president, who behaved, in my view,
worse than any "Jerry Springer" guest.
Everything is sort of confrontational,
loud, in your face, brash, conflictual.
Reality television might have given him
a platform for that.
-If you took what we did in the 1990s
and showed it today in its entirety,
the cancel culture... People's heads would explode.
It's not going to work because Jerry was in the '90s
and that's when it shocked everybody.
-[ Audience chanting "Jerry!" ]
-We have to say this about Jerry.
For all his faults,
he was the first to admit that he was doing a stupid talk show
and that there was no more significance to it than that.
-Somebody said, "Were you ever offended
by any of the guests on the show, by something they did?"
And the answer was no.
When the man said "I married a horse,"
I said, "I'd love to see a picture of the bride."