“Well, you know, there’s been all this controversy about the fights,” says Jerry Springer, clutching a microphone and wearing an ill-fitting suit. “Well, today we have a love story. Please meet Mark. He’s been together with his wife for ten years, and married for the last five. Please welcome to the show, Mark’s wife!”
A horse walks onto the stage. The crowd bursts into a mixture of jeers and applause. It was 1998, and the media had already smeared Jerry’s show for being immoral and trashy, yet here he was, upping the ante. He didn’t care about his viewers thinking he was a good person; he cared about giving them what they wanted. And what they wanted was to see Jerry Springer talk to a guy who fucks horses.
Archival footage of this scene appears in Netflix’s new two-part documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, released earlier this week. It provides a behind-the-scenes look at America’s most controversial talk show. Running for three decades, from 1991–2018, it brought brawls, bestiality, and baby-mama drama to living rooms across the country, drawing around 8 million viewers per episode at its peak—and the ire of polite society.
The British-born son of Holocaust survivors who once served as mayor of Cincinnati, Springer has been called many things: “ringmaster for America’s dark side,” and “an appalling diversion” who “ruined American culture,” for example. Accused, not unfairly, of getting rich off a sideshow that exploited the poor, he was subjected to endless op-eds, protests, and even censorship: Some of his episodes, like the aforementioned show about a man who married his horse, were banned. If his contemporary Oprah Winfrey was America’s mom, Jerry was America’s black-sheep uncle who stacked porno mags on the back of his toilet and let you smoke weed on the couch.