We weren’t daily viewers of The Jerry Springer Show back when it was regularly airing throughout the ’90s and ’00s, but we watched enough of it to know what the show was about. Confrontations, brawls and an affable host taking it all in. A new docuseries takes a look at the 27-year run of the Springer show, and how its formula of outrageousness made it a phenomenon and the only daytime talk show to beat out Oprah Winfrey’s show.
JERRY SPRINGER: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: The typical chaos that goes on behind the scenes of an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
The Gist: Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is a two-part docuseries, directed by Luke Sewell, that examines the history of The Jerry Springer Show, which ran from 1991 to 2018, its impact on American culture, and just how a show that featured daily brawls ended up being the most watched in daytime at some point during its run.
Sewell doesn’t talk to Springer himself, since he died in 2023. But he does talk to Richard Dominick, who was the executive producer of the show from 1994 to 2008; he’s the one who took a mostly-nondescript, Donahue-style talk show and made it into the anything goes festival of craziness that it became known for. He also speaks to a few of the shows producers, who developed stories submitted by viewers into episode of the series. Most notable among those producers is Tony Yoshimura, who produced the infamous 1998 episode “I Married A Horse.”
The series mostly concentrates on the time period where Dominick led the show, which includes controversies involving accusations that the situations presented on the show weren’t real. It also includes the very real murder of a show guest, Nancy Campbell-Panitz, on the day the episode she was on with her ex-husband and his new wife, Ralf and Elanor Panitz, aired. Campbell-Panitz’s son, Jeffrey, is also interviewed and figures heavily in the second episode.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera Action is definitely of the same vibe as the Cultureshock episode The Rise Of Trash TV. (There’s also the movie Ringmaster, in which Springer plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself.)
Our Take: When we were watching Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, we kept wondering why the team behind the series seemingly waited until Springer was no longer with us to produce this documentary. But the more we watched, the more we understood: Their idea was to portray Springer as going along for the ride that Dominick created, and reaping the monetary and pop culture benefits of it.
That choice to downplay Springer’s role in the show that bared his name seemed strange, and we were happy that former Chicago Sun-Times media critic Robert Feder expressed that notion during the second episode. Springer wasn’t just a host that was handed a blue card and told to react to the craziness in front of him. If he were “just the host,” he wouldn’t have so vociferously defended the show in the media, when the “trash TV’ accusations came out, or when the Panitz murder case was so strongly connected to the show. His connection to the show was more than just collecting a massive paycheck, even if Dominick was the one picking the topics and pushing his producers hard to find and foster insane stories.
What we also wondered about is that the show carried on for ten more years after Dominick left, but both Dominick and the filmmakers dismissed those years as the show being a shadow of itself that did nothing but repeat formulas that Dominick had established. We think that’s Dominick giving himself too much credit. Sure, making the show appeal to our basest instincts was a brilliant move on his part, but it’s not like he didn’t have dozens of episodes about cheating couples and brawl after brawl after brawl for years on end. It’s pretty inevitable when you have to produce 200 shows a year for almost 15 years, like Dominick did.
As much as Sewell and company tried to take a centrist view of the show, much of the series emphasizes how soul deadening it was to work for the demanding Dominick and his quest for increasingly outrageous content. Yoshimura’s perspective of this is front and center, though another producer, Melinda Chait Mele, talks about burning out to the point where she ended up putting on a fake love triangle, a mistake that got her fired.
Was The Jerry Springer Show the detriment to society that it’s portrayed to be? Hard to say. Even Dominick acknowledges that brawl-filled reality TV was made possible by the Springer show. But the docuseries fails to mention that, while Springer made brawls a regular thing, confrontations and brawls on daytime talk shows were things that already happened and Springer wasn’t the first talk show to deal in the outrageous. They just amped it up to a degree that people just could not turn away. We wish some of that context made it into the docuseries.
Sex and Skin: Pixelated nudity from the show — and the photos of Springer having relations with some show guests. There is also the guy who married his horse kissing said horse, which skeeved us out to no end.
Parting Shot: The first episode ends with a reenactment of police arriving at the scene of Nancy Campbell-Panitz’s murder.
Sleeper Star: We liked hearing from producer Annette Grundy because she was completely unapologetic about what the show did, almost as unapologetic as Dominick was.
Most Pilot-y Line: Only one interview with a former guest made the cut of the docuseries, and while her experience was interesting, we would have wanted to hear from a couple of more people about how producers amped them up before they hit the stage.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The reason why we’re so hard on Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is that The Jerry Springer Show, and Jerry himself, are such fascinating topics that we wanted a deeper exploration of the cultural phenomenon that the show was than what we got. It’s one of the few cases where a docuseries needs more episodes, not less.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About The Brawl-Filled Daytime Talk Show appeared first on Decider.
