How The Jerry Springer Show changed television

24:59How Jerry Springer changed television, and Ed Sheeran’s latest legal troubles

Television personality Jerry Springer died yesterday at the age of 79. While he was best known for hosting the outrageous daytime television program The Jerry Springer Show, there was more to Springer and his legacy than many realize.

Culture critics Syrus Marcus Ware, Kathryn VanArendonk and Ian Steaman join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to unpack the cultural impact of the long-running eponymous series — from how The Jerry Springer Show evolved into one of TV's messiest programs, to its far-reaching impact on the way TV is made today.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Kathryn, maybe I'll start with you on this. What made The Jerry Springer Show work so well in its 90s heyday?

Kathryn: Jerry Springer came out and, to many people's minds, showed us versions of ourselves that had not been allowed to previously appear on television — which is to say messy, violent, the lowest form of humanity … where previously there had been some sense of decorum, particularly earlier in TV history, with very strict broadcasting rules about what you were and were not allowed to say on television and what kinds of language was allowed to be used. The Jerry Springer Show said, "Actually, relationships between people can be terrible." 

Here are these moments that are certainly not proud moments for people, and they are often hidden in the most intimate, quiet domestic spaces. And instead, we are going to broadcast them for a huge viewing audience. That's not great in a lot of ways, but clearly it's something that lots of people loved having access to. There is a long, healthy and certainly continuing tradition that proves the moneymaking potential of humans' desires to be voyeuristic monsters — and The Jerry Springer Show is really one of the chief examples of how well that formula works when somebody is willing to just be like, "Yeah, this is people."

Elamin: This is people. This is detritus. This is everybody at their worst, willing to show that. Honestly, Ian, it made me really uncomfortable — and I'm not saying this as a 35-year-old man with thoughts about what should be on television. I mean as a teenager, I had a sense of, "I don't know if I should be watching this?" But also at the same time, I and many millions of people also decided we should be watching this. Ian, how did you feel about the show?  

Ian: I won't lie and say that I was a viewer of the show, but at the time that it was on, I was working in the music industry, specifically in the hip-hop space, and that show — and shows of its ilk that I think it set the tone for — at that time really resonated within the culture and were kind of adjacent to what was happening in hip-hop. I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that it gave a platform to the people that weren't necessarily seen on television at the time, and I think that was akin to what was going on with hip-hop. Hip-hop gave a voice to people that were not necessarily heard within the music industry. And I think it was a precursor for something that I think has happened to our television in general. Jerry Springer's past was that he was a councilman and then the mayor of Cincinnati… 

Elamin: A progressive mayor, we should say, right?

Ian: Yeah, that progressive-minded mayor. He wanted to talk about those issues on his show, but that didn't really work for the show and it evolved into what it became. I think that's kind of a metaphor for what's happened with our TV news and our television in general — that these cable news shows try to cover stuff with some sense of gravitas, and it doesn't work. So now what we have is kind of this circus-like atmosphere around a lot of our news television.

Elamin: I have to say, people often forget that part about his past — also, the fact that when this show launched, it was just a regular daytime talk show where he wanted to interview people about their issues. Syrus, we've got to talk about the fact that the formula [on The Jerry Springer Show] is wholeheartedly exploiting the guests for the sake of controversy and for the ratings. Many of those guests were trans folk, many of them were Black or brown. You're a trans person who was consuming pop culture in the 80s and 90s. What did you make of The Jerry Springer Show back then?

Syrus: It was like a train wreck that you couldn't look away from. I mean, it was so captivating even though it was so exploitative. As a young trans person, it was really one of the first places that I saw other trans people.… For me it was an amazing watershed moment to say, "Hold on a minute. This is a possibility in my life" — even as Jerry Springer was really bringing them out to kind of exploit and sensationalize their identities. I mean, Jerry Springer was the person who invented the whole, "We hear that you have this really sensitive thing in your life. Let's bring them out!" And then suddenly they would bring out these surprise guests that would horrify whoever was sitting there. We saw a lot of that baiting of the trans subjects but in general, for me it was one of the first times that I saw trans people and it was really helpful in that way.

Elamin: This is a bit of the duality of the show, right? The idea of it made us look at things that were uncomfortable to look at in terms of the conflicts that it portrayed, but it also made those conflicts possible and sort of brought them to the light in ways that maybe they wouldn't have been…. Syrus, what do you think? Does Jerry have a point there? 

Syrus: Well, I think that we need to see a variety of different people on TV and in the media. But what Jerry Springer was doing was really trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. He wasn't giving respect to these lower income or marginalized community members who aren't seen on Seinfeld or Ally McBeal. It wasn't like he was saying, "Let's uplift your stories and really give you a sense of dignity." He was saying, "Let's really exploit your story and make you this thing that we get to sort of make fun of." We're all kind of in on the joke laughing at the poor person, as opposed to uplifting or celebrating them in their lives.

Elamin: I'd say that that particular blueprint, Kathryn, has kind of been baked into how we look at television today. Yes, The Jerry Springer Show lives on in syndication and in the viral clips that get shared quite a bit. But when you think about where Jerry Springer shows up now on television, where do you see it?

Kathryn: You can see it very clearly in the continued legacy of daytime television. About a decade after Jerry Springer, The Dr. Phil Show became one of the most popular — and that is certainly operating on the same model. The Maury Povich Show is a contemporary, and it's clear that as Jerry was sort of pushing farther in that direction, Maury then echoed…. But the thing that I find most striking, actually, is that I think a lot of what Jerry Springer did in daytime has now become the sort of de rigueur primetime form of reality show entertainment for so many people. The models of reality television that we see are based on exactly that same thing: the person you don't want to be talking about comes in the door, marginalized people whose lives we are watching for representation (and also they are being exploited), people who are sort of handing their lives over to producers, which does allow us to see them — but they have no control over how it's depicted. It is everywhere now.

Elamin: I think there's something about The Jerry Springer Show that makes me uncomfortable in terms of acknowledging some kind of founding figure in this moment of television. But also when you look at the evidence, it just really is everywhere, isn't it?

Kathryn: It is absolutely everywhere, and as with so many legacies on television, it is not a comfortable legacy. It is too bound up in the fact that society is not perfect, and so when TV is then attempting to sell us ourselves back, inevitably the product is going to be a big mess.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.