Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/15/jerry-springer-show-ends-produ.html
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Different tabloid, same shtick…
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Good riddance
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On the plus side, these types of shows and day time soap operas drove me into the arms of books.
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Huh, I had actually forgotten this even existed. Ignorance was bliss.
But Jerry Springer’s made up and amped-up confrontations brings me to another realization, that mainstream TV has been offering fake as plausibly real for longer and deeper than I realized.
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About 20 years too late.
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While his show was never my thing I kinda like the guy. He never ever tried to play the show up to be anything other than what it exactly was and never spoke like the behavior was the way to act.
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Um, he baited his guests into being awful to each other and then sat down and moralized at the end. It was atrocious.
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Springer, who in a previous life had been a politician, understood that politican->TV celebrity (not the other way around) was the right direction. Here’s his opinion of Trump:
I think, nothing against him personally, but he has no business being our president. He doesn’t represent American values. Three million more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Now the electoral college is in question if we find out what the Russians did to affect just a few votes.
In any event, America is a multicultural society, and America was created with the idea that it didn’t matter who your parents were or where they were from, or if you believed or prayed to God. You could follow your dreams, that’s America. He wants to replace the Statue of Liberty with a wall. It’s the most un-American thing you can think of, and to have that in the White House just defeats everything we grew up believing about our country and every reason why we send our kids off to fight and die to protect this country.
If you don’t believe in the idea of America, why the hell are you running for president? If I’m angry at Donald Trump, it’s because he ran for president in the first place not believing in our country.
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The Jerry Springer Show was still in production???
I thought it had died off ages ago… but then again, I don’t watch actual tv anymore.
His show wasn’t half-bad, back before it changed to the Ricki Lake/Geraldo/Maury ‘trash tv’ format for higher ratings in the early 90’s.
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He is 74 according to Wikipedia… which seems like a good time to get out of the biz.
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On the one hand, I do get that some of these shows have been better done than others, depending on how cynically they pander to group pathos vs actually engaging discussions on their way to catharsis. On the other hand, it still seems like circus style exploitation of the guests.
I think there’s a certain classicist elitism in simply dismissing the people who appeared on it, which is what a lot of the hate for these shows boils down to. But I still feel the format itself is questionable, even when it’s done relatively well.
That said, that’s all very much from the perspective of someone who always found these shows off-putting, and therefore has only a superficial understanding of the phenomenon.
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No, think Donahue, waaaay back in the day; that’s the kind of vibe Springer’s show had, originally.
But that kind of daytime tv just wasn’t pulling the ratings it used to, and Springer never got to Donahue’s level of success, maybe in part because Oprah had already locked that whole niche down.
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I’m probably filtering my memories through the more sensationalist ratings-grabbing versions. Like you, it’s been many a moon since I even had broadcast or cable TV hooked up.
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Springer’s show was mostly modeled after this guy:
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Is “Nightstand with Dick Dietrich” still on?
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Late '92/early '93 would have been the last time there was any legit content on that show, IIRC.
No, that would be Geraldo, where even the host sometimes got into physical altercations. Trust me, it was Ricki Lake’s success that flipped the script, literally.
There were many girls in my college dorm who actually scheduled their fucking classes around that show, just so they could watch it; that’s how huge a franchise trash tv was (and probably still is.)
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The guest were based on the idea of that show. Springer was, however, a much more mellow character host.
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Springer himself was actually quite charming and likeable much of the time, this is true. But the show itself was largely rooted in Downey’s “trash TV” format.
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Downey was the first to pioneer taking the ‘shock jock’ format to tv, but his show only lasted two years in the late 80’s, while Ricki Lake was on the air for over a decade from 1993 to 2004.
Not so coincidentally, 1993 is right around the time that Springer’s ratings dropped and his show’s format changed drastically.
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