RIP Jerry Springer
Mourning a great: Context Collapse #205
Jerry Springer, the former Cincinnati mayor who enjoyed a spectacular second act as a TV talk show pioneer, passed away on April 27. He was 79.
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Springer was an iconic part of the television landscape for decades. Take it, Wikipedia!
Gerald Norman Springer (February 13, 1944 – April 27, 2023) was an American broadcaster, journalist, actor, producer, lawyer, and politician. Born in London, England, during World War II to refugees escaping the Holocaust, Springer was raised in Queens, New York City. He attended Northwestern University School of Law, qualified as a lawyer, and first became actively involved in politics working for the campaign of Robert Kennedy in 1968.
A Cincinnati City Council member, Springer served as the 56th Mayor of Cincinnati from 1977 to 1978. He then worked as a local news anchor in Cincinnati where he won several Regional Emmy Awards for commentary. Springer was best known for hosting the sometimes controversial tabloid talk show Jerry Springer from 1991 to 2018. He also debuted the Jerry Springer Podcast in 2015. From 2007 to 2008, he hosted America's Got Talent, and from 2019 until 2022, Springer hosted the courtroom show Judge Jerry. He was noted as a pioneer in the emergence of 'trash TV', his eponymous show was a "commercial smash and certifiable cultural phenomenon" in the 1990s.
A life well lived. So here’s the thing…
Jerry Springer’s legacy is simple. He created and hosted a television talk show that took all the other trends his competitors were following, and simply cranked them up to 11.
Other shows had exploitative content. Springer’s was a little more exploitative. Other shows winked and nodded at sex and drugs. Springer’s made them front and center. By the standards of 1990s television, Springer managed to build a media empire out of a show that was aimed at less-well-off economic demographics that were normally ignored by advertisers.
And hahahahah LOL there’s no way in hell anything like the Jerry Springer Show could be pulled off in the 2020s media environment. I’ve written about this a million times before, but we’re living in a great fragmenting of mass media. Syndicated talk shows can still make reliable piles of money (Hello Drew Barrymore Show!) but they are also competing against TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and a whole bunch of other platforms. Putting it bluntly: Random social media video is way better at the weird and sleazy than syndicated television shows put together by experienced producers.
With all that said, the Jerry Springer Show played a key part in our modern media landscape. It was a reliable generator of talent who would go on to work on other shows, and it coarsened a media landscape that was already coarsened and primed to be even, well, trashier. Here in 2023’s great fragmenting, you can be as classy or as trashy as you want. The niche is there.
Rest easy, Jerry.