America’s populace can be its most powerful force and its most terrifying danger. You can find evidence of this in political-science texts or op-ed pages or histories of the Andrew Jackson administration. Or you could have watched cultural populism play out on “The Jerry Springer Show,” weekdays from 1991 to 2018.
Springer, who died on Thursday at 79, rolled out his talk show like a bountiful and pungent wheel of cheese and threw the studio doors open for the messy feast. The people, or his selected, outlandish version of them, rolled in: mother-daughter dominatrixes, people who had self-amputated various body parts, a man who married a horse.
TV Guide voted “The Jerry Springer Show” the worst show in TV history, and the program embraced that accolade in its introduction, which also boasted of “No Golden Globes, no Emmys, no respect.” He mocked his critics’ spells of the vapors, arguing that he was just presenting reality, warts and all. His name became a verb, a shorthand for a shameless sensibility that would continue through the O.J. Simpson trial, the reality-TV era and, eventually, certain presidential debates.
The pretty, respectful-remembrance version of this history is to say that Springer pushed against TV’s elitist norms of propriety to make the case that ordinary people, in all their mess, were important. What’s more, other ordinary people cared about them, by the millions. In this light, he was doing a daytime-TV version of what “Roseanne” had done in prime time a few years earlier.
There is a point there: Springer, especially in the early years of his show, seemed to engage with his guests, however outrageous. Doing this job for this long without liking people — on their level, not as an abstract concept — would make for a long three decades.
The easy rejoinder is that Springer’s wildly successful show made sport of those people and mainstreamed their exploitation. Even trash TV operates on moral assumptions — “The Jerry Springer Show” accepts that being a candidate for “The Jerry Springer Show” is not a badge of honor — but programs like Springer’s gave the audience permission to enjoy the grotesquerie. He was the ringmaster (the name of his 1998 film) of a human circus whose tent eventually expanded beyond his own show.
Again, tough to argue with. Springer himself, who had a sense of humor about his job, conceded his role in what he euphemistically called the “democratization” of culture.
But his show also demonstrated that TV populists, like all populists, aren’t just reflecting broad, unmediated reality. They decide who should represent the people. They choose and shape their audiences; they make decisions about which populi get their vox heard and who gets turned into a spectacle. You could choose to showcase different sorts of stories with a more positive attitude and still be a hit; see Oprah Winfrey, whose talk show Springer’s dueled with in the ratings.
Springer didn’t invent the trashification of TV and pop culture. His show was modeled on earlier talk shows that dipped the occasional toe in the mud, like Phil Donahue’s, and its ascent came alongside the likes of Howard Stern. (The early, issues-oriented incarnation of “Springer” didn’t do well in the ratings.) And the show didn’t so much create reality TV as it rose on the same heated currents: It was a product of the same era that gave us “The Real World” and “Cops.”
But he was one of the most talented accelerants, and he steered lustily into the nosedive. After him came the reality-TV deluge — not all of it exploitative or meanspirited or cynical, but enough of it. The internet and social media let people put themselves and others in the public glare without the need of a talk-show booker. America became unshockable.
And Springer’s success at giving people what they wanted, not what they wanted to believe they should want, was imitated beyond TV.
People sometimes resist connecting cultural movements with politics, but Springer himself was a politician before he was a TV star. He worked on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign and later was a Cincinnati city council member and mayor. He recognized that the skill set from one job translated to the other, and we have since learned that the door swings both ways.
Betting that people will choose conflict and chair-throwing over high-minded discourse would eventually be a recipe for success in both cable news and reality TV. And it took a candidate who was an instinctive success in both fields — the “Apprentice” host and “Fox & Friends” regular Donald J. Trump — to demonstrate that a relentless appeal to an audience’s id and to the camera’s appetite for incitement was the fastest route to the center of the American stage.
Again, it would be an exaggeration to say that Springer made President Trump possible; the candidate had been cultivating a media persona since the 1980s. But they shared similar programming instincts.
Springer covered the 2016 election for British TV, and he acknowledged some parallels between his own heyday and the Trump era. The twist — maybe not as spicy as the ones in a Springer episode, but still — is that Springer, a lifelong liberal, openly disdained President Trump. After a 2016 general election debate, he tweeted: “Hillary Clinton belongs in the White House. Donald Trump belongs on my show.”
History had other plans. As it turned out, “The Jerry Springer Show” was now everywhere.
