By Timothy Bella
During a run of daytime TV filled with fights, profanity and nudity, Jerry Springer had no idea why his guest was having trouble with his neighbours not liking his wife.
The man named Mark told Springer on his popular daytime talk show in 1998 that he didn’t know why they had an issue with his wife, who, the man said, didn’t make any noise or talk to anyone.
Springer, who said years later that he was not allowed to know what the episode was about, looked down at his card and saw the name of his guest’s wife and urged her to come out: “Let’s bring out Pixel!”
That’s when Springer found out his guest was married to a horse.
The moment delighted the roaring, hysterical crowd that chanted the host’s name – Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
And it left the master of trashy daytime TV, who Oprah Winfrey once described as leading a “vulgarity circus,” wondering what the hell was going on. “This is pretty sick, isn’t it?”
“I’m thinking that his wife fell off the horse. You don’t think, ‘Oh gee, that’s his wife,’ ” Springer told Meredith Vieira in 2016. “So I’m going, ‘Oh my God, someone check backstage!’ Then, the producers start yelling at me, ‘No, no, that’s his wife!'”
The bestiality episode, simply titled, “I Married A Horse,” never made it to air in some cities. It was a subject that went too far even for Springer, who, in the eyes of critics, pushed the boundaries of decency on “The Jerry Springer Show” in the 90s and made TV history during the programme’s nearly 27-year run.
“This actually happened,” Springer said of the horse episode, still in disbelief decades later.
Springer, who had gone from a life as a lawyer, mayor of Cincinnati and network news anchor to one of television’s kings of controversy, died Thursday at his home in suburban Chicago. He was 79.
His long-time publicist, Linda Shafran, announced the death in a statement, which did not specify the cause. It has since come to light that he was battling cancer.
In the hours after Springer’s death was announced, fans remembered the role he had on afternoon TV and shared some of his most memorable episodes, including the multiple instances when members of the Ku Klux Klan were invited on the show only to get repeatedly punched in the face.
Some also shared his cameo in the 1999 film “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” in which Springer exchanged blows with Mike Myers’s Dr Evil character.
But the show wasn’t always about scandal and sex. In fact, the host and his producers have admitted that the initial run of “The Jerry Springer Show” was more serious – and more boring.
When Springer’s show debuted on September 30, 1991, executives hoped they could make the host into the next Phil Donahue.
The show focused more on political issues like gun violence and homelessness, and had guests such as the Rev Jesse Jackson and National Security Council staff member Oliver North to give the show a no-nonsense vibe.
“He wasn’t doing anything that might be controversial or outrageous,” Greg Paeth, then a TV writer for the Cincinnati Post, said in an A&E documentary in 1998.
Richard Dominick, who was a producer in the early part of the show, put it more bluntly to A&E: “It never really took off, it never was exciting. I hate to say it was dull, but it probably was.”
In the spring of 1994, Springer’s show was in danger of getting cancelled. Dominick, who had become the show’s executive producer following the departure of Burt Dubrow, was given an ultimatum by Multimedia Entertainment, the company overseeing the show.
“You have until November to make the numbers better, or the show will be cancelled,” Dominick recalled to The Washington Post in 1998.
The strategy was to essentially do the opposite of what Springer had previously done, and lean into his personality instead of making him into something he wasn’t.
The producers couldn’t book celebrities or politicians, so they focused on finding regular people with everyday problems people could relate to – and other issues that people couldn’t have ever imagined.
As Springer explained it at the end of a 2015 episode, they focused on “regular folks of no fame, little if any wealth and very little influence – folks just taking a moment, which they rarely if ever get, to let the world know something about what they are thinking or feeling or doing.”
“It was time to listen to the public, to show another side of life rarely, if ever seen on television,” Springer wrote in his 1998 biography, “Ringmaster!”, co-authored by Laura Morton.
Dominick had a different spin on it, hoping to attract viewers that also tuned into late-night host David Letterman in the first years of his CBS show.
The show runner wanted to make the programme “very sexy” and make television that would be attractive to people who were channel-surfing with the volume off, he said to A&E.
Part of that was putting Springer’s name on the screen for the whole episode because no one knew who the host was at the time.
“We decided that we were going to go after what I like to call the Letterman crowd because there was no one doing a show for college kids,” Dominick said in the 1998 documentary.
But what pushed Springer to new heights was the content of the show changing drastically to promote more sex, more conflict and more fights – many, many fights.
After initially being told by Multimedia Entertainment to tone down the absurdity on the airwaves, the show was eventually bought by Universal Television, which pushed Springer, Dominick and the staff to do what they wanted.
“They said, ‘Do your show and let’s see what happens’,” Dominick told The Post in 1998. “So I stopped leaving things on the cutting-room floor.”
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From there, the show’s popularity sky-rocketed thanks to episodes such as “Kung-Fu Hillbilly,” “Klanfrontation,” “I Broke The World’s Sex Record!” “I’m Happy I Cut Off My Legs” and “You Slept With My Stripper Sister!”
The show also featured episodes where gay and transgender guests were mocked by fellow guests or audience members. “The Post” declared Springer in 1998 to be “The King of the Trash Heap.”
Springer acknowledged in his book that the direction of the show was a big departure from where he had started, but said the ratings said he was doing something right. By 1998, about 6.7 million viewers were watching the show each day.
“It was rougher, but real – and certainly wilder – but viewers loved it, in overwhelming numbers,” he wrote.
Viewers loved it so much that Springer had even become a challenger to Winfrey, then the queen of daytime talk. At one point, Springer beat Winfrey in a key demographic, women between 18 and 34, and tied her ratings in the last week of December 1997.
In three cities – Atlanta, Cleveland and New Orleans – Springer even beat out Winfrey in overall ratings.
Winfrey admitted in a 1999 interview with the Sunday Times of London that what she was seeing from the “vulgarity circus” of Springer’s show made her consider leaving her programme. (Winfrey’s show eventually ended in 2011.)
“Unless you are going to kill people on the air, and not just hit them on the head with chairs, and unless you are going to have sexual intercourse – and not just, as I saw the other day, a guy pulling down his pants and pulling out his penis – then there comes a point when you have over-saturated yourself,” she said, according to the Associated Press.
Springer responded to Winfrey in the New York Post by saying she was great, and that he didn’t blame her for not liking the show.
“My mom wouldn’t have liked this show, either – and I loved her,” Springer said.
The show’s popularity began to fade at the turn of the century, and a dark cloud came over the violence that aired daily.
One of Springer’s guests, Nancy Campbell-Panitz, was murdered by her ex-husband shortly after she appeared in 2000 on the show, where she was confronted by her ex and his second wife in an episode on love triangles.
The last episode of “The Jerry Springer Show” aired July 26, 2018, ending a run of nearly 5 000 episodes. Springer attempted to re-create some of his TV magic on “America’s Got Talent” and “Judge Jerry”, but didn’t find similar success.
Years before the show ended, Springer reflected on an episode at the start of the 25th season about what the run has meant for him and his life.
While he had previously admitted what he had hosted was “a silly show” that he would never watch, Springer shared how he had learned that “deep down, we are all alike.”
“We all want to be happy, we cry when we’re hurt, we’re angry when we’ve been mistreated and to be liked, accepted and respected, not to mention loved, is the greatest gift of all,” he said.
Then, he emphasised that he never thought he was better than any of the people who appeared on his stage to talk to him.
“I’m not better,” Springer said, choking up. “Only luckier.”
He then concluded with the same seven words he had said thousands of times before: “Take care of yourself and each other.”
*The Washington Post’s Harrison Smith contributed to this report
