Jerry Springer passes

NBC5 Chicago local news hired Jerry to drop a commentary on the news every night and 2 serious newscasters quit in protest (eventually going back) then Jerry resigned after 2 nights.  It was all kinda nutty from both sides. 
 

You all know the show was 75% fake, right?  I was hired for the show twice, once as an audience member and once as a segment that never filmed.  Most of the "baby daddy" and plausible stuff was real but scripted - meaning they were real people who wanted to know who the father was, or whether or not the roommate was gay, but they were coached to amp up the drama.  They looked hard for real content, but filled in most of the time with stuff that was actors playing a role.  Imagine how hard it would be to do an entire daily soap and fill it with that much tabloid if you only did real, actual people.  There is no way to find that much good content when you're basically doing a circus side show.

I was supposed to film a banter after "diaper boy" (a segment about a grown-ass man who outed himself as liking to wear diapers... a sketch that was recycled about three times over the years on the show) who was played by an actor that I had done some V.O. commercial work with.  Nice reunion, but it felt weird hugging my friend in a diaper and nothing else.  My segment was supposed to be about telling my "fiancee" (an improv actress I hadn't met until about 20 minutes before) that I'm secretly a priest and therefore can't have sex with her.  They had such a good shoot with diaper boy, and my segment was a plausibility stretch, so they just kept filming diaper boy until they had enough footage to make an episode.  Imagine how I felt when "secretly a priest" got sidelined for "diaper boy"

The Maury Povich show was similar until they reformatted in the 2000s to just "Maury."

Still, Springer was a nice guy.  I didn't know him, but met him a few times.  I had invited him to my bar and he showed up one night, months later.  He saw me and tipped his glass in my direction.  A human has passed away.  Don't care about his deeper self, or his low-hanging-fruit show, I just know he had a pulse and it stopped.  Rest well, fellow human.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Dude, CBS Morning just referenced the "adult baby" episode in reference to his show.  You were soooo close.  

glueguy (Forum Supporter) said:

I prefer to remember him as the Cincinnati councilman that paid for hookers with personal checks.  I remember living in Cincinnati when his show was still taped there before they moved from local to national.

 

RIP Jerry

 

As a Cincinnati native myself I still remember my favorite English teacher in early high school telling us the tale of his checkbook adventures with a prostitute.  I remember him as a news person on TV, a mayor (that I think did an ok job, don't remember shenanigans besides the check), and a TV show guy that I never watched,

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

You all know the show was 75% fake, right? 

That makes no difference whatsoever.

GameboyRMH said:

I always found it entertaining that a political genius settled on making his living by hosting a show about lowest-common-denominator humans being terrible and trashy to each other, a show most appealing to terrible and trashy people. There are layers of meaning there...

As I grew older, I gradually formed the impression that what he really did was to satirically mock and exploit the petty people who WATCHED his show, not the people who were on it. Like a giant Andy Kaufman gag where the people watching don't realize that in reality THEY are the butt of the joke.

I'm still upset I never went to a taping.  Tickets were free, and I'm sure it would have been a good time. 

I blame Springer and the like for the explosion of reality TV shows and scripted drama.

One of my ska mixes from the early 2000s has a song entitled "We're All Part of the Jerry Springer Family.". Catchy tune, wish I could find a link to it anywhere on the Internet. May have to upload it myself, considering the recent passing of Jerry. 

Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) said:

I blame Springer and the like for the explosion of reality TV shows and scripted drama.

No. Production executives did that. Springer just exploited it.

He had the foresight to take that drivel to its logical conclusion. The guy was smart, and I'm sure he knew what he was doing.