‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ explores the legacy of the world’s grossest talk show

In the new Netflix documentary, Springer survivors debate the legacy of the popular but reprehensible show.

The new two-part docuseries now on Netflix, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, belongs firmly in the crowded streaming documentary genre that I like to call “In Retrospect, Everything That Was Popular in the Late 1990s Was Absolutely Disgusting.” We’ve already seen series about Woodstock ’99, Girls Gone Wild, and the ways men reacted to Britney Spears, so a look back at the Springer show was probably inevitable.

The Jerry Springer Show, hosted by the man who, as a young RFK disciple, was once the mayor of Cincinnati, started in Chicago in 1991, as a fairly conventional talk show that tried to find intriguing or occasionally inspiring stories. When that format stagnated, the show turned to new executive producer Richard Dominick, a minor celebrity at the time thanks to his work writing headlines for the Weekly World News.

Dominick began to push for more of an outrageous show. First, it was naked ladies, and then it was hosting members of the Klan, who on one occasion were invited to “debate” the leaders of the Jewish Defense League, with the segment ending predictably.

After that particular melee, the show pivoted towards all brawling, all the time. Only the fights weren’t usually between hate groups or even ideological opposites, but more often romantic rivals, usually straight out of trailer park central casting. The pre-combat phrase “you’re the bitch, bitch!” ended up appearing in the majority of episodes.

Eventually, the show settled into a pattern in most of its segments: Very poor white people, almost entirely from an Appalachian region described as the “Springer triangle,” were invited on the show, encouraged by producers to fight one another on television, and were essentially dumped off to the side as soon as the show was over. In some cases, the documentary confirms, guests who didn’t cooperate were denied a plane ticket home.

The show also seemed to think that queer people, especially what were then called “transexuals,” were inherently hilarious and mockable.

By around 1998/’99, around the same time as the WWF Attitude Era, Woodstock ’99, and everything in pop culture being EXTREME, the Springer show was just about the hottest thing going. It emerged for a few years around the turn of the millennium as a major pop culture colossus and even briefly dethroned crosstown rival Oprah as the #1 daytime talk show for a time. While the Springer show lasted for a very long time, from ’91 to 2018, its time at the center of the zeitgeist went about from 1996 to 2001.

As the documentary shows us, Dominick and Co.’s solution, at every turn, was to take it up a notch, often into such uncharted areas as incest, a guy who married his horse, and the man who “cut off his own male organ,” in a fit of gay panic.

And I admit, as a student during that period, I was not immune to the charms of this, so I guess I was part of the problem. My other big remembrance of the Springer heyday was when my sketch comedy group in college performed a bit that re-enacted the plot of Hamlet as a Jerry Springer episode.

Even so, this was is all pretty evil, exploitative stuff, all overseen by Dominick, who is presented by himself and others in contemporary interviews as a man with no scruples whatsoever. The other main interviewee is Toby Yoshimura, a longtime producer on the show and the son of longtime Saturday Night Live production designer Akira Yoshimura; Akira’s disapproval of Toby’s work on Springer led to a years-long estrangement between father and son.

The other talking heads associated with the show have varying degrees of regret about the part they played in all of it, while Robert Feder, the veteran Chicago media critic, is presented as the voice of reason.

Remember that clip where the creator of the Bumfights videos got invited onto Dr. Phil and came dressed as Dr. Phil, to demonstrate that they’re both pulling off the same exploitative con? The Springer show did the same thing, only in a more loathsome way than either the Bumfights guy or Dr. Phil.

At the same time, we see the cultural backlash that ensued, which included elected officials, as well as future Black Lives Matter figure Father Michael Pfleger, calling for the show to go away.

The censors, as usual, were wrong. But there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that the show, as it existed, was pretty hard to defend.

Fights Camera Action is unfortunately light on interviews with past guests, although to be fair if I had once appeared on The Jerry Springer Show, I can’t imagine I’d be all that inclined to revisit it.

When attention turns to the one murder involving guests on the show, Dominick seems most concerned that the show was blamed for it, and that they were forced by the lawyers to “tone things down” after one guest murdered another guest. Whether the show’s crew really decamped to Hedonism II just to dodge subpoenas is left ambiguous.

There was also a separate question of whether or not the guests were “fake”; the film seems to land on the answer that most of them were “real,” even if they were encouraged to exaggerate and play up their issues. One producer admits she was fired after she booked guests that turned out to be fake; she says she should have known because they were from Boston, and “Springer guests aren’t from Boston.”

Jerry Springer himself is no longer with us, having passed away at age 79 back in 2023. But the way the film handles him is somewhat odd. The show implies that Springer himself was just along for the ride and content to let Dominick, the devil on his shoulder, control everything behind the scenes.

The interviewees can’t stop mentioning what an honorable prince of a guy Springer was, as if he bore no responsibility for the numerous excesses of the show that bore his name. I can understand not wanting to speak ill of the dead, but it wasn’t like Jerry had no agency.

When Springer had to tell his staff about an embarrassing scandal involving a threesome with porn stars, they all act like they were shocked that such a wholesome guy had gotten involved in something so sordid… as if Springer hadn’t had to resign from the city council in Cincinnati due to a separate hooker scandal in the 1970s. Or as if he wasn’t the host of The Jerry Springer Show.

Another complaint I had is that the documentary acts as if the Springer show invented the idea of a sleazy daytime talk show.

Not mentioned is that Geraldo Rivera, on his talk show starting in the late 1980s, did much the same thing, albeit with a sheen of journalistic inquiry, at least before the show pivoted to all-OJ, all the time. The original talk show brawl between neo-Nazis and Black civil rights activists, after all, happened back in 1988, on Geraldo’s show. Long before the Springer guest murder, the same thing happened on The Jenny Jones Show back in 1995.

And finally, adding to my usual documentary pet peeves, Fights, Camera, Action is a “two-part series,” totally just over 90 minutes, which is what used to be called a “feature documentary.”