Jerry Springer's Life is a Cautionary Tale of Greed

Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist

Jerry Springer, famed talk show host and elected official, passed away, his family announced in a statement, at the age of 79.

I extend my sympathies to his family and those who knew him best.

As I reflect on his life and career, I’m not going to dwell much on his political career or who he was; there are other places you can read better accounts of those aspects of his life. But his imprint on the morning talk show industry and pop culture was unmistakable and, I would argue, highly detrimental to society and his show’s guests.

For those who don’t remember, his talk show, “The Jerry Springer Show,” started as a political show, getting into the day’s issues. This made sense since he was a former mayor and had been involved in politics for some time. His shows were interesting but not particularly compelling for the general audience. That’s not what audiences home during the weekdays want to see.

In the mid-90s, the show pivoted to confrontation and salacious topics. This wasn’t new; talk show hosts like Ricki Lake, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Montel Williams had used this approach for years beforehand. What was new was the physical aspect of the confrontations. Guests commonly attacked each other on set, throwing punches and chairs at each other to the wild applause of guests chanting “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry”. The ratings went through the roof, and the show, and Jerry Springer himself, became white-hot famous. Springer was as ingrained in pop culture for a 5-year stretch as Donald Trump was, with cameo movie roles becoming a standard water cooler topic nationwide.

I wish I had had a chance to interview Springer before he died because I would have asked him one single question:

“Was it worth it?”

Springer became fabulously wealthy due to the show’s ratings, which were directly a result of non-stop physical violence on his show with his name on it. At the time, many religious or conservative groups protested this and got some sponsors to drop off the show. Because they were right-wing groups, they were dismissed in favor of giving the audiences the gladiator-esque entertainment they demanded.

But, given that physical violence on talk shows is a thing of the past (and no other talk show ever really tried to compete with it), it does need to be asked:

“Was it Worth it?”

I’m all for giving the audiences what they want, generally speaking. But we all know there’s a line and a societal cost for crossing that line.

Watch a sample clip from The Jerry Springer Show here. Guests engaged in behavior we wouldn’t condone from children, wildly clapping and chanting “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.” It’s grotesque and subhuman behavior on everyone’s part.

What good did it do for anyone to have constant, routine, and most likely planned physical fights on set between guests? Is that something we want to encourage people to do: fight instead of talk?

This happened on Springer’s show, under Springer’s watch. If this approach was the producer’s brainchild, he could have stopped it in the name of basic morals and ethics (last I checked, even in the 90s, liberals and progressives didn’t believe in fighting to solve differences).

But he didn’t. He took the money instead, sacrificing other people’s physical well-being to get rich.

There’s still some debate over whether the fighting on Springer’s show was real, staged, or spontaneous. I love debating fundamentally silly things, but this situation has no debate. If the show didn’t want fighting, they would have put it in the contracts of the guests that they would be immediately arrested if they touched another guest. No other show had this issue. Multiple guests are on record saying the fights were planned well ahead of time, and there were even quotas per show of how many fights they had to do.

The fights, whether fake or real, were actively planned and encouraged. There is no debate, and Springer let it all happen while counting his stacks of $100 bills.

This is planned, calculated immorality and borderline evil, putting his financial well-being ahead of other people’s safety and the overall societal impact.

Worse, he had the gall to end every show with his famous tagline, “Take care of yourself and each other,” as if that negated everything that happened in the previous hour.

If that wiped his conscience clear, well, shame on him.

At the end of the day, and at the end of our lives, I think we all hope we leave the world and the people we interacted with in a better place because of our actions.

Did Jerry Springer leave the world in a better place due to his life and actions? Ultimately, that’s for everyone to decide on their own.

However, we may have a clue about what Jerry Springer himself thought about that question.  

Springer was quoted in a Reuters interview, describing his interest in the show as saying:

“I would never watch my show. I'm not interested in it. It's not aimed towards me. This is just a silly show.”

In a separate interview, he apologized on behalf of the show, admitting he ruined the culture and hoping he doesn’t burn in hell.

Such candor is welcome; penance is crucial to forgiveness and ultimately going to Heaven for most faiths.

God may judge as God sees fit; however, Springer still has every right to be judged by us. Again, I highly doubt he felt the show was clever at the time and only realized the truth after he stopped making money from it. He knew the show was stupid, poisonous, and probably dangerous at the time and approved it anyway.

If Springer had been given a chance to do it all over again, would he have stopped the physical violence of his show and sacrificed his wealth?

We’ll never know what he would have done, but we can learn from his choices. Maybe that’s his legacy, a cautionary tale for anyone doing any job.

Don’t only think about the money. Say no to bad choices presented to you by others. Only do the work you and your mother would be proud of.

If you do that, you’ll probably leave the world in a better place because you can’t take your money to the afterlife.

The only things that matter are leaving the world a better place and leaving behind a positive legacy for your family members.