Summary
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is a riveting docuseries peeking behind the curtain of trash TV’s greatest-ever circus.
At one point in Netflix’s brilliant two-part docuseries Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, The Jerry Springer Show is described as a modern-day version of the Roman Colosseum, which certainly fits. But I think it’s slightly off. The whole thing felt, at least to me, like a social science experiment, albeit one designed to destroy the lab and claim on the insurance by deliberately combining elements so inherently combustible that calamity was the only option.
Either way, it worked – we’re still talking about the show now. Jerry Springer, the once political hopeful turned TV news anchor turned still-reigning king of trash TV, died in his Evanston home in April of 2023, but his relevance never waned. He was synonymous with the worst kind of exploitative reality television imaginable, but by all accounts remained a nice guy, just along for the ride, clutching to the back of a behemoth that metastasized into a cultural phenomenon at the expense of rural America.
But the story of The Jerry Springer Show is fascinating, and director Luke Sewell (Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King) knows it. This is a documentary with basically no formal flourish. It’s content to intersperse archive footage of “classic” episodes with interviews with former producers and guests and let the truth speak for itself. That truth is as nauseating as it is riveting, but it’s impressively unvarnished, providing a clear account of how a floundering syndicated late-night talk show reinvented itself as a morally bankrupt circus with a uniquely gifted ringmaster. And it becomes obvious early on that the ringmaster wasn’t Jerry Springer.
The mad scientist behind The Jerry Springer Show is quickly revealed in Fights, Camera, Action to be executive producer Richard Dominick, whose work with the Weekly World News had earned him his share of notoriety and a facility for outrageous, attention-grabbing headlines. His stroke of genius was applying the same system to episodes of The Jerry Springer Show. Just like how nobody could skim past a story titled “My Toaster is Possessed by the Devil”, the theory was that no late-night channel-hopper worth their salt would ignore an episode with “I Married A Horse” in the corner.
And Dominick was right. He was similarly right that having the studio audience – which often had to be talked in off the street – chant “Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!” for the former mayor of Cincinnati would catch on. People assumed Springer was famous even before they made him so. Soon the show was a ratings hit. But it was an episode titled “Klanfrontation”, which pitted enthusiastic white supremacists against Irv Rubin and the Jewish Defence League and immediately devolved into a physical fight, that gave Dominick his next idea – every episode should be like that.
A still from Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action | Image via Netflix
From there, fellow producers Melinda Chait Mele, Annette Grundy, and Toby Yoshimura were tasked with booking guests – almost all from the same triangle of small-town America – and whipping them up into a frenzy to guarantee violence and chaos. The guests and the stories were real; that was the trick. But everything was stage-managed to produce maximum carnage. These working-class people from the middle of nowhere, mostly uneducated and many with substance abuse problems, were treated like royalty, picked up in limousines, and plied with free drink tokens until they were ready to blow. Then they were let loose on stage and nature was allowed to take its course, observed by a slightly bemused and ever wise-cracking Springer.
It was inevitable that there would be consequences to this, and Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action devotes its second half to a particularly heinous example when Ralf Panitz murdered Nancy Campbell-Panitz hours after appearing on the show. Jerry Springer wasn’t to blame, but the show almost certainly was. The public humiliation and ridicule, the surfacing of such potent emotions, and the complete absence of any aftercare were the perfect concoction.
The great tragedy of The Jerry Springer Show is that so many of the guests believed so earnestly that it was intended to help them. Jerry Springer never helped anyone – this is laughingly confirmed by Dominick, who is still visibly proud of the show’s various accomplishments, which include the impossible feat of dethroning Oprah in the ratings. Springer just played his part, which was to use the political acumen he had once hoped would carry him to high office to downplay his show’s negative influence and swat aside the controversies. He sold his soul, but his legacy became eternal.
You can quibble about that legacy all you like – this documentary doesn’t openly condemn The Jerry Springer Show, but shows you enough of how it worked that it’s impossible not to see how contemptible it was – but you simply cannot deny its existence. And that’s why Fights, Camera, Action is a can’t-miss docuseries. It peeks behind the curtain of one of humanity’s greatest and most terrible circuses, and in so doing it will, inevitably, attract a whole new swathe of viewership who will be shocked, appalled, and inexplicably entertained by it all over again.
