Not many talk-show hosts get a movie playing themselves doing their own talk show. Not many talk-show hosts inspire operas. Not many talk-show hosts wind up doing a talk-show after a major political scandal involving paying a hooker with a signed check and then *still* winding up as mayor of a major US city for a stint.
Jerry Springer was probably not a good man, but in 2011, I did meet him in the sportsbook at the Planet Hollywood hotel in Las Vegas where he was very nice to me and posed for drunken blurry pictures that have since been lost to bad asset management on the interwebs. He was there hosting the Vegas nightly show of America's Got Talent. He smoked a giant cigar and looked bored.
Like many talk-shows, Springer started off trying to do reasonable interviews that went in-depth on important issues, but when cancellation seemed imminent, he and his producers transformed his show into the chair-hurling, fist-tossing, hair-pulling bonanza it was. Which made Springer rich, ultimately ran for roughly 25 years and spun off a few other shows, including a behind-the-scenes that made no one look good. But when your set is designed to look like a sewer with a stripper pole, I guess no one cares?
In the 90's, Austin TV was hard to get on rabbit-ears, so I watched Jerry as he and Wishbone on PBS tended to get the best signals at my efficiency over off Airport Blvd. The TV landscape was littered then (as now) with a panoply of "talk shows". It was mostly trash TV made by trash people, featuring trash people, and for trash people (ie: me). Jenny Jones. Sally Jesse Raphael. Maury. Ricki. It was garbage and a lot of it was faked one way or another. But it was honest fakery. Dumb hucksterism playing on the TV in auto-dealer waiting rooms across the country to kill downtime with noise. Unlike Oprah, the legacy of these shows is not a flood of pseudo-science and Rich Dad snake-oil salesmen given the glow of legitimacy. Jerry knew his show was dumb. And he more or less said so multiple times per episode.
The funniest moment I recall for Jerry was not on his own show, but watching the City of Chicago's aldermen make Jerry and his producers come down to city hall with a threat to shut down the show, which seemed utterly legally unenforceable. The Jerry team was polite in the manner of Eddie Haskell and answered all the questions and took the abuse and knew "my god, this is so good for the ratings" and went right on doing what they were doing.
Springer went off the air in 2017, I believe. I hadn't watched it in years. The last time I'd watched an episode straight through was probably 2004 or so.
Jerry wrapped every episode of his show with a Springer's Final Thought, which was insane. His show was devoid of lessons other than "people are yikes". But he did try to gently provide advice to the audience based on the human drama/ shitshow they'd just borne witness to. I mean, how he found new ways to say "well, cheating can lead to bad feelings" 1000's of different ways is truly a marvel of the human spirit.
I am unsure what Final Thought he'd leave us with now. But I think he was amazed by people, and if he weren't, even the money wouldn't have kept him coming back for more than two decades. Sure, people saw him as showing the worst of humanity, but maybe he was just showing us humans, and maybe he figured out that there wasn't a world of difference between the people on his show, in his audience and the people hauling him down to Chicago City Hall. He may have known he wasn't so different. He just got a front row seat to all of it, and got to play mediator. And get paid for it at that.
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