KKK brawls and the man who married a horse: Inside the making of The Jerry Springer Show

A new Netflix documentary delves into the dicey story of the controversial ‘trash TV’ sensation. Louis Chilton speaks to the director of ‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’, as well as two of the original series’ producers, to find out more about working on the chat show that was both revered and reviled

There is no line,” Richard Dominick, the revolutionary and reviled brain behind The Jerry Springer Show, once said. “If I could kill someone on television I would execute them.”

Dominick, a former tabloid hack known for his outrageous (and spurious) headlines, was hired onto Jerry Springer in 1991, but it was only when he took over as executive producer three years later – amid dismal ratings and the threat of cancellation – that his ethos took hold. Within a matter of months, Jerry Springer was transformed from a by-the-numbers daytime talk show to a sleazy, cynical ratings hit. It took “trash TV” to shocking new lows, and made itself an American institution in the process.

The scandal-splattered story of Jerry Springer is now the focus of a new Netflix docuseries, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, available on Netflix from today. Over the course of two episodes, director Luke Sewell charts the show’s rise from scrappy underdog to reality TV titan, using archive footage and interviews with those involved in the show’s production. “When I first saw Jerry Springer as a teenager, I was dumbfounded,” the British filmmaker says. “It seemed like TV from another planet – this wild, crazy trainwreck that you couldn’t not look at.” The series, he continues, made its name “exploiting guests for people’s entertainment, and ultimately just for ratings. It contributed absolutely nothing positive to society in any way, and in many ways was incredibly negative.”

Anyone unfamiliar with the tone of Jerry Springer would probably be able to grasp it from the episode titles alone. Instalments ranged from the prurient (“I Slept with 251 Men in 10 Hours!”; “Sexy Strippers Exposed”; “Threesomes with my Sister”) to the incendiary (“Angry Women Attack”; “Black Supremacists vs White Supremacists”; “Attack of the KKK Dad”) to the simply bizarre (“Pregnant Gals and a Mime”; “I Live in a Box”). Physical fights were a frequent occurrence: this was humanity at its most feral. “It’s an age-old thing, the Roman Colosseum,” says Sewell. “And they were just very good at packaging that, and having the balls to show the most utterly extreme, wild stuff. Particularly in Britain, it was like, ‘Wow, God… this is America?’”

Springer wasn’t the only talk show to indulge lurid, tabloid-y elements. Oprah contained these features too, as did programmes such as Geraldo and Maury. Many in the UK have described The Jeremy Kyle Show as the British equivalent, until that show’s cancellation in 2019 following the suicide of a guest. (Like Springer, Kyle thrived on romantic “gotcha” moments, polygraph tests and interpersonal hostility.) But none had the sheer unruly excess of Springer under the auspices of Dominick. “Jerry Springer was obviously an American phenomenon,” Sewell says, “and Kyle felt different. It didn’t have the same kind of frat party vibe that the Springer Show went for.”

Jerry Springer’s most scandalous moments were notorious. There was the time, for instance, that Springer pitted members of the Ku Klux Klan against members of the Jewish Defence League in a debate, which devolved into a physical brawl. Another episode featured an interview with a woman who had amputated her own legs unnecessarily. Counterbalancing the guests – most of whom were working class and under-educated, scouted from an area of Tennessee, Ohio and Georgia known unofficially as the “Springer Triangle” – was Springer himself, a former lawyer, news presenter and politician, who was briefly the mayor of Cincinnati. Springer may have walked on to rowdy audience chants of his own name (and, later, would enter the stage by sliding down a stripper pole), but he was an incongruously put-together host, a kind of pinstriped ringmaster orchestrating the mayhem from on high. Springer was still alive when the Netflix documentary entered production but declined to participate; he would die of pancreatic cancer in 2023, at the age of 79.

Let’s rumble: A brawl breaks out on the set of ‘Springer’ (Getty)

Melinda Chait Mele worked as a producer on the series during the late Nineties – overseeing the moment when Jerry Springer sensationally overtook Oprah in the battle for daytime ratings dominance. “It was just extraordinary pressure,” she recalls. “There were times I worked 20-hour days for days on end. It was gruelling, heavy and chaotic… but satisfying in a way.” The workload took its toll on the production staff; in the Netflix documentary, Toby Yoshimura, another of the producers during the show’s heyday, describes how his time on the show led to a spiral of drinking and cocaine addiction. “My personal demons are out there on the documentary,” he tells me now. “I’ve forgiven myself for all of that time all of that s***. And I don’t regret anything that I was part of on that show.

“I was there, right when it got super crazy,” Yoshimura adds. “If you want to outline my involvement, I’m probably responsible for some of the chaos.” Among his responsibilities was sourcing and preparing the show’s contestants. He was intimately involved in one of the defining scandals of Jerry Springer’s nearly three-decade run – the abortive attempt to air an episode focusing on bestiality. The episode, bluntly titled “I Married a Horse”, was pulled from broadcast just hours before it was meant to air, amid a massive scandal. “Of all the really crazy stuff that I was involved in, that was probably the nuttiest,” laughs Yoshimura. “You know, talking to a guy for six months that lives with a Shetland pony is a bit strange, as your day job.”

The more pressure that the public put on us – and the press, the city councils, the pastors, basically calling us the devil – that only hardened us as a team

Toby Yoshimura, former ‘Jerry Springer' producer

If the horse incident was an exercise in amusing grotesquerie, other scandals to hit Jerry Springer were altogether darker. Allegations of exploiting guests – of manipulating them into ridicule and violence – refused to abate. “Jerry himself would say, ‘No one forced people to come on the show,’” says Sewell. “Obviously you get people that would fake their stories, but there’d be people with genuine stories that felt like Springer could help them. It was a very convenient way of passing off what they were doing as some kind of public service – giving people a chance to come on TV who might ordinarily not have.

He adds: “But of course, these people didn’t have power. It wasn’t a celebratory situation. It was just showing people at their lowest points, and often in a very sort of negative stereotypical light.”

Jerry Springer was also condemned for its propensity for platforming racists and bigots, and for its offensive treatment of transgender people. In 2000, the show faced its most damaging scandal, when a love triangle featured on the show ended up in a homicide, just hours after the episode aired. Springer, and the rest of the show’s staff, refused to admit any responsibility in the tragedy. The programme was ultimately denounced by the judge in court, but faced no legal repercussions.

Toby Yoshimura, as seen in the Netflix documentary ‘Fights, Camera, Action' (Netflix)

Over the years, the production staff grew used to the incessant din of outrage, to the picket lines of protesters that they would have to pass through to get to work each morning. “The more pressure that the public put on us – and the press, the city councils, the pastors, basically calling us the devil – that only hardened us as a team,” says Yoshimura. “It literally became us against the world. Like, OK, you want to mess with us? Bring it.”

In the middle of the series’ run, says Mele, there was a lot of awareness among the staff that “people think this is very tasteless” – but they refused to let that alter their methods. “We weren’t sitting around asking, ‘Why is it so tasteless?’ or ‘Can we make it more tasteless?’ We weren’t analysing it. You’re in your bubble, you’re working like a maniac, and you’re just kind of living through what’s happening at the moment.”

Jerry Springer ultimately ran until 2018, a run that spanned 27 seasons and 3,891 episodes. By the final decade of its lifespan, it was no longer the cultural juggernaut it once was, but there’s no understating the impact that Jerry Springer had, on both the landscape of reality television and the world at large. (One of the show’s more eccentric legacies: in 2005, it was satirised in a hit stage musical, Jerry Springer: The Opera, written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee.) “I think its DNA can be felt in a lot of things, from social media to American politics to news,” says Sewell. He mentions a quote from Springer himself, regarding the controversy-laden, insult-slinging US president Donald Trump: “He took my show and brought it to the White House.”

While Fights, Camera, Action casts a damning look at the show’s legacy, both Mele and Yoshimura say they have no regrets. “I’m very proud of my time at Jerry Springer. It was a really, really hard job and I was really, really good at it,” says Mele. I ask her what she thinks of Sewell’s miniseries. “I think the new documentary is… very watchable,” she replies.

Yoshimura is similarly unfazed by the backlash. “It’s like we used to say on the show: ‘We would rather you hate us than love us’ – because hate lasts longer,” he grins.

“I could throw a rock and find 50 people that love us. But the guys that hate us? I promise you they tune in every single day, just to have something to complain about. It sounds crazy, but you know… welcome to daytime talk shows.”

‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ is available on Netflix