Netflix’s new two-episode limited series on the Jewish television icon Jerry Springer’s oft-maligned talk show puts forward a depressing paradox: the 90s programme, which glorified everyday violence and the humiliation of its vulnerable subjects for television ratings, has now been recycled and glitzily repackaged for a Netflix docuseries so we can continue to gawk at the bizarre and dehumanising events that took place in that Chicago television studio.
Maybe if I’d enjoyed the series more, this irony would feel sweeter; it could bring forth real considerations about our seemingly insatiable human desire for drama, for blood, and the evolution of this desire from 90s tabloid talk shows to today’s sensationalised “made for platforms” TV.
But Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is just another moralistic “exposé”, this time centred on the profanity-laden, scandalising American show that fancied itself “the modern version of the Roman coliseum” and the inciter of American shock culture.
The series offers a behind-the-scenes look at The Jerry Springer Show, featuring interviews with journalists, producers – namely executive producer Richard Dominick, who seems to have sold his soul to the devil and nudged Springer to do the same – as well as some of the show’s guests, who detailed the emotional manipulation they experienced off-camera.
The producers were apparently instructed to seek out low-income provincial guests with domestic disputes, stories of adultery, incest or, in one especially controversial banned episode titled “I Married a Horse,” bestiality. In “Klanfrontation”, the episode that kicked off the show’s violent streak, members of the KKK started a brawl with a Jewish guest, and even some in the audience got involved.
Springer himself is, apparently, the lesser of The Springer Show’s evils, according to the series, which casts him as a generous, good-natured person who was blissfully unaware of what went on backstage to ensure the audience got their money’s worth. The son of Holocaust survivors, Springer surely knows better than most the evil embedded in human nature, the predilection for hatred, for cruelty. So why did he capitalise on that weakness for so long, why did he repeatedly provoke it in his guests?
The son of Holocaust survivors, Springer surely knows better than most the evil embedded in human nature, the predilection for hatred, for cruelty. So why did he capitalise on it?
The docuseries offers little comfort for those whose lives were marred by The Springer Show, because the producers show scarcely any remorse for their openly exploitative actions undertaken in the name of simply “doing their jobs.” Huh, we’ve heard that one before. The problem is society, they say; after all, there would be no Netflix documentary without the drama of The Springer Show to inspire it.
Well, you can spare yourself the drama of this one. I have a feeling I’ll forget about it long before the next sensationalised docuseries comes out on Netflix. In this post-Springer world, that could be any day now.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action
Netflix | ★★✩✩✩
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is on Netflix now
