Jerry Springer was a ringmaster or an architect of civilisation’s end, depending on who you ask

The debate on Jerry Springer’s legacy began long before his death on Thursday at the age of 79-years-old. Obituaries for the particular brand of exploitative reality television that dominated the late 1990s featured him so prominently that they might have served as his own.

The former mayor of Cincinnati turned talk show host brought a steady dose of violence into the living rooms of American homes every afternoon, and became a cultural phenomenon in the process. But even as academics, television writers and commentators argued over his place in American cultural history, Springer seemed to bristle at suggestions of his own significance.

“I would never watch my show. I’m not interested in it. It’s not aimed towards me. This is just a silly show,” he famously said of the series that bore his name.

That contradiction between how the world saw him and how he viewed himself would come to define him. Springer described himself as a “ringmaster of civilisation’s end” — a dispassionate observer in the apparent moral decay of modern America, but others saw him as its architect. Former Education Secretary William Bennett described the Springer show as "a leading purveyor of cultural rot". Christine Daniels, a trans writer, called it “an exploitation circus".

Janice Peck, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of a book on the daytime talk show phenomenon, said the Jerry Springer show used the less unfortunate for entertainment purposes.

“The producers may say its harmless and not hurting anyone, but I’ve always felt there was an ugly side to this,” she told the LA Times in a story to mark the show’s 20-year anniversary, back in 2010. “The people on the show are there to entertain those who feel they are superior.”

But speaking to The Independent after Springer’s passing on Thursday, Professor Peck said the tendency to see Springer as epitomising some moral decline, and comparisons to Donald Trump, as “hyperbolic and disingenuous”.

She said that both men “are also products of a larger political, economic and cultural context—as are those who admire and scorn them. Blaming Jerry Springer for the current state and crisis of US society is easy, and a way to avoid looking too long and deeply in the mirror.”

Springer defended himself against accusations of elitism over the years. In 2019, he told Today: "I think what was really the only good thing about the show, at least the part that I thought, is that it was the first time we really saw regular people on television. When people criticize the show, if you’re honest about it, they’re not criticizing what they’re talking about because celebrities will do the exact same thing."

Springer forged an unlikely path to becoming a talk show titan. Born in a London Underground station that was being used a shelter from German bombing raids in the Second World War, he moved with his parents to Queens, New York, when he was four-years-old.

His parents were German-Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, just days before Hitler invaded Poland, leaving behind other family members who later perished in the Holocaust.

Springer thrived in education, earning a degree in political science, and later a law degree. He immediately went into politics, becoming a campaign aide to Robert Kennedy. After the Senator’s assassination he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to work in law. After a failed run for Congress as a Democrat at the ripe age of 23, he became deeply involved in Cincinatti politics.

He worked his way through the city council until becoming vice mayor. His political career was interruped by a scandal that would have made fitting content for his own show when he was caught paying prostitutes by cheque across state lines in Kentucky.

In 1977, he made a triumphant return and was elected Mayor of Cincinnati, a position he held for four years. Following a failed attempt to run for governor of Ohio in 1982, Springer turned his hand to television, taking a job as a news anchor on WLWT-TV, Cincinnati. That would lead him to the Jerry Springer show, which began in 1991.

After an early effort to keep things serious, Springer’s show eventually found its feet leaning into the weird.

The show would usually descend into absurdity or violence – often both at the same time. Cheating spouses would admit to their affairs on stage in front of a whooping crowd, their lovers would fight each other, and Springer would watch it all with a wry detachment.

In one episode, “You Slept With My Stripper Stepsister”, a woman who worked at a strip club confessed to her sister that she had slept with her boyfriend. It was, the audience learnt, the third time this had happened. Despite a half-hearted effort by security to keep the two apart, they fought on stage until someone’s wig came off while a boxing bell sound effect rang out.

In another, taglined “Holiday Hell Feast”, a guest named Melody is horrified that her sister is dating a 54-year-old biker named Wolf. Laid out in front of them on the stage is a Christmas feast — turkey and all the trimmings. It didn’t take long for the purpose of the food to become clear, and in short order everyone on stage was picking pumpkin pie frosting out of their hair.

For Springer’s fans, the fights were a harmless form of entertainment. Many doubted if they were even real.

“That’s what made the show so entertaining. I don’t think any of it was actually real, so the violence was mostly for entertainment purposes in my eyes,” Jesus Manuel Pizarro, an audience member at a 2014 taping of the show, told The Independent.

“Springer was iconic, funny, and entertaining. That’s what made it so special,” he added.

The show occasionally used transphobia to bait guests, and featured people revealing to their partners that they were born in a different gender.

The show garnered huge ratings and harsh critical reviews. In 2002, TV Guide named it as the worst show on television. But even that title recognised that the show was serving an audience.

“No one has turned guilty-pleasure TV into more of an art form than Jerry Springer,” editor in chief Steven Reddicliffe told The New York Post at the time. “Awful television shows are a storied part of our society. Some of them actually are very successful and are great guilty pleasures.”

That same year, a woman on the show was murdered hours after the episode she featured on aired, which revealed she was sleeping with her violent ex-husband unbeknownst to his new wife. The couple were found guilty of her murder.

Springer’s show would go on to spawn an entire industry of similar reality tv shows — each with a different theme or setting, but all based on the idea that fights and arguments will bring in viewers.

"Jerry Springer is the father of the ‘confrontainment’ genre of the 1980s and 90s that probably provided the groundwork for the wide assortment of reality shows that followed decades later,” Maria Grabe, a professor at Indiana University who wrote a “functional analysis” of Springer’s shows in 2002, told The Independent.

“Springer recognised that the lives of ordinary people were compelling to media users and selected the most explosive of circumstances to be played out in full view of a studio audience and home viewers,” she added.

Professor Grabe analysed 100 episodes of the show in the late 1990s and argued that the show “promoted conservative family values through the cheers and jeers of the studio audience and Jerry Springer himself.”

“Altruism, modesty, honesty, monogamy were behaviors applauded on the show while cheating, social deviance, selfishness, dishonesty, even slacking were hissed and booed,” she said.

Despite the controversy, Springer remained popular throughout his life. Jene Galvin, a family spokesperson, said in a statement following his death: “Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried whether that was politics, broadcasting or just joking with people on the street who wanted a photo or a word. He’s irreplaceable and his loss hurts immensely, but memories of his intellect, heart and humor will live on.”

Fans remembered him for his calm demeanour in the midst of flying chairs, and his thoughtfulness after the chaos. His “final thought,” a monologue he delivered at the end of each show always ended with a plea for kindness.

“‘Til next time, take care of yourself, and each other.”