Mike Pence was subpoenaed to testify about the events leading up to the 2021 US Capitol attack by Trump supporters.

The chants of his name defined a decade: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”

Jerry Springer died today at 79. His most obvious legacy will be the syndicated talk show that bore his name—one that embodied the frenetic voyeurism of the American ’90s. Sex, affairs, secret children, incest, love triangles, love trapezoids, more sex, people wrestling and sparring and throwing chairs at one another: The Jerry Springer Show was the tabloids come to life. The program democratized scandal and then exploited it. It allowed its viewers to peer into the lives not of celebrities, but of everyday people. It was gaudy and sad and insulting and irresistible.

Springer’s show, in that way, predicted our current moment even as it embodied its own. It was TikTok before TikTok, Twitter before Twitter, the logic of reality TV wrangled onto the set of a talk show. The most revealing element of The Jerry Springer Show, though, isn’t its scandal-mongering. It’s that the show, like its host, had its roots in politics.

Springer was born in London, in 1944, to Jewish Holocaust refugees. After coming to the U.S. as a child, he studied politics at Tulane University and received a law degree from Northwestern University. He embarked on a career in politics: Springer worked as an adviser to Robert Kennedy and served as the mayor of Cincinnati in the late 1970s. He ran for governor of Ohio—but then, after that attempt proved unsuccessful, he switched careers. He became a reporter at a local TV station and rose up to become an anchor. In 1991, he debuted The Jerry Springer Show. It began as a political talk show in the Phil Donahue vein: social issues and current events, high-minded discussions of politics. It was, like most talk shows of that time, relatively sedate. It featured conversations about gun violence and homelessness. Its guests included commentators such as Oliver North and Jesse Jackson.

And then … the show evolved. Or, perhaps, it devolved. It maintained its talk-show format but changed the subject of the conversation. The show’s titles were tabloid headlines turned into hour-long melodramas: “I Married a Horse” and “I Slept With 251 Men in 10 Hours!” and “I’m a Breeder for the Klan.” The debates became brawls. The chairs on set turned into weapons. The audience cheered. It jeered. It signaled its approval of the fighting by chanting Springer’s name. Springer had tapped into an American market that can never be fully satisfied: voyeurism. In 1998, Springer briefly bested Oprah Winfrey in the daytime ratings. Later that year, his show aired episodes that featured none of its signature fights; its ratings plummeted. In July, it put the violence back in and topped Winfrey’s ratings once more. In 2000, Springer signed a five-year contract for a total of $30 million.

One of Springer’s legacies will be his realization that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Another will be his recognition that even shock can grow stale. Springer had to keep finding new ways to outdo the drama on his show. In the 2000s, he began arriving onstage by sliding down a stripper pole. When real people’s stories seemed insufficiently titillating, he brought on a character—the drunken “Reverend Shnorr”—to punch things up. Springer masterminded the havoc, but on-screen, he presided over it for the most part like a mild-mannered father amused by his unruly children. And then, for the final twist, he tried to graft meaning onto the chaos he’d just presented to his viewers. Springer ended each episode with his “Final Thought,” the wan sermon he delivered as a response to the stories just aired. The address, a holdover from a similar one he’d delivered during his days as a news anchor, tried to find a moral in the madness. It concluded, always, with the same line: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

The hypocrisy of the Final Thought—its episode-by-episode effort to cleanse all the scandal with sanctimony—will be Springer’s most lasting legacy. The Jerry Springer Show exploited people fervently and ruthlessly and lucratively. It treated real tragedies as diversions. And it did all of that as it pretended to be more profound than it was. Springer tried to frame the show’s exploitation as anthropology, as something revealing and instructive. But it was Springer’s own arc that would prove most culturally revelatory: His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.

[From the March 2023 issue: We've lost the plot]

When Springer’s show ended, in 2018, The Guardian proposed that perhaps “The Jerry Springer Show was such a relentless orgy of humanity’s worst impulses that audiences became too sad to keep watching it.” As the article went on to make clear, the opposite was true. Jerry Springer’s talk show had not become too tragic to maintain an audience. It had simply become redundant.

Lyft, one of the largest ride-sharing companies in the US, plans to lay off 26% of its staff, or 1,072 employees. The downsizing, detailed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is part of a larger cost-cutting strategy announced by CEO David Risher earlier this month, just as he joined the…

Read more...

The US and South Korea sign a pact to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. 

Group calls move to address an expected spike in border crossings a 'Faustian bargain' as COVID-19 expulsion rule ends.

The brutality of Till's 1955 lynching, on display at his open-casket funeral, galvanised the US civil rights movement.

Russia's foreign ministry says it denied a US consular visit request for journalist amid growing calls for his release.

Businesses slashed inventories in fear of an upcoming downturn while high interest rates hammered the housing market.

US intelligence agents are after scores of Russians in connection with dastardly global plots and outright criminality.

Springer's tabloid TV show often featured sexual themes and family conflict and reached millions over a 27-year run.