"Fights, Camera, Action": How Jerry Springer exposed the beginning of America's decline

Before the man who transformed “The Jerry Springer Show” into a gladiatorial showcase of the worst common denominator took over as its executive producer, Richard Dominick made his living writing headlines for Weekly World News and the Sun such as “Two-headed Man Sings in Stereo,” "Toaster is Possessed by the Devil" or “My Wild Affair with Bigfoot. ”

The weirdest ones earned him a recurring guest gig on “Late Night with David Letterman," where he’d swear with a straight face that every story was true. In the archival clips featured in “Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action,” Letterman’s audience was clearly in on the joke. Letterman’s show was a funhouse where absurdity was encouraged.

Years later, after Dominick had already made his mark on “The Jerry Springer Show” as its fortune-shifting executive producer, Mark Matthews (a pseudonym) was Springer’s guest along with his “wife” Pixel. The pair’s union shocked the studio audience in 1998, especially since they were kept in the dark about their unwitting participation in an episode called “I Married a Horse.”

When Matthews kissed the Shetland pony on the mouth — on camera, with tongue — that may be the first widely televised moment when our relationship with reality, propriety and a common sense of morality began to fracture. Why didn’t anyone recognize this was wrong and stop this from happening? How could this possibly be real?

But it was. Matthews wrote an entire manifesto defending his zoophilia. I know this because every page of it was faxed to the newsroom where I worked shortly after the episode aired. The sender’s intent, as I recall, was to legitimize Matthews as someone who simply thinks differently than the typical person. As establishment journalists, who were we to judge him? Just asking questions.

Dominick’s present-day reaction to seeing the gotcha intro to “I Married a Horse” is to giggle softly, then gesture with both hands like an orchestra conductor cueing a “ta-dah!” from the brass section. “Greatest love story of all time,” he deadpans.

To Dominick, it was. “The Jerry Springer Show” gave the audience the proof his tabloid stories never could, even the ones accompanied by interview footage. Most of its featured romantic betrayals and fistfights were real, revved into the red by producers taking advantage of their subject's emotional discombobulation.

“The Jerry Springer Show” aired nearly 5,000 episodes over 27 seasons before being shoved through a woodchipper in 2018, and to say that nobody missed it by the time it ended is accurate.

When it had run its course, “Springer” was also a liability, linked to a murder case that becomes the narrative focus of the documentary’s second hour) and blamed for another man’s suicide. But its obsolescence is the result of its influence more than its exposure to civil litigation.

Only at the very end of “Fights, Camera, Action” does its director Luke Sewell link up the documentary’s best idea, which Dominick offers at the start.

At Weekly World News, when his craziest headlines made the cover, sales would go up. Nobody believed Bigfoot had a love slave, Dominick admits, but the public bought it. He theorizes people would rather read about Elvis being in a UFO because “It takes you away from your world into another world,” he said. “And that’s what I wanted to do with Springer.”

He succeeded to such a degree that, as featured media critic Robert Feder explains in the final minutes of the documentary, we’re still living with its effects. Curse "Springer" all we want, but it wouldn't have been a hit if we didn't enthusiastically watch what Jerry served up for us.  

Feder credits, or blames, "Springer" for ushering in our current era "with no guardrails or boundaries," and the documentary illustrates this with clips from “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” where people are throwing hands. A vintage clip from “The Apprentice” also makes a cameo to exemplify the way "Springer" made saying anything we think of into a virtue.

Perversely enough, these shows also take viewers into other worlds — those of middling wealth and off-the-rack glamour that seem just out of reach. Our fascination with reality stars rests in the illusion that, if not for their endless money and couture bags, they'd be just like us. They upend tables, throw drinks in each other's faces and throw hands at their parents. You know, like normal, everyday people.  

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This is why, for a time, “The Jerry Springer Show” was beating the intentionally uplifting “Oprah” in the ratings. Oprah Winfrey’s message was one of self-improvement. “Springer” confirmed that no matter how badly your life was going, someone someplace else was worse off – and, as the show portrayed it, their misfortune was the sum of their choices.

“Fights, Camera, Action” takes more interest in exposing the psychologically traumatizing workplace at “The Jerry Springer Show.” Dominick lorded over his employees to such a warped degree that one of its associate producer subjects, Toby Yoshimura, swears this is the last time he wants to talk about the show, ever.

Some of his other co-workers who agreed to appear in “Fights, Camera, Action” are more sanguine about the experience, and even a bit giddy at the memory of it. None as much as Dominick, who doesn’t seem to regret a thing. Springer, who died in 2023, made a schtick of apologizing for ruining the culture at the end of his life. He also made $60 million by branding that destruction with his name. Dominick’s payout by 2008, when he was fired, cannot have been piddly.

If “Fights, Camera, Action” endeavored to go beyond a simple glimpse at the “Springer” show’s dark legacy, that would require more than two episodes and filmmakers more invested in exploring its broader cultural impact arm-in-arm with its degenerate behind-the-scenes practices.

Someone likens the host to Moneyball and Dominick to the man who figured out the formula: The British-born, Queens-raised Springer was an avatar of coastal elitism his executive producer molded into the end of the 20th century’s P.T. Barnum.

Behind the scenes, his producers eagerly exploited the grimmest episodes of vulnerable people’s lives, never disabusing them of the false assumption that appearing on “Springer” would somehow help them. His small, pressured crew viewed those incest victims and cuckolded spouses as fresh meat for their sausage grinder.

But until his death, when asked about whether he believed he was taking advantage of his subjects, Springer insisted that he was their champion. There’s plenty of footage showing Springer using his power as the show’s host to goad subjects into fights, call their romantic choices sick or depraved, or even crack jokes about their situation. Nevertheless, he argued, what other top-rated TV series would give airtime and weight to the miseries of the overlooked and downtrodden without painting them as villains?

“Fights, Camera, Action” ends with an exasperated Yoshimura calling out the fact that the sole reason this documentary exists is the monster ratings for "Springer" only showed up after it ditched its feel-good format to show men punching women in the face and busty exhibitionists doffing their tops.

The reason that the filmmakers only want to talk about that part, Yoshimura says, is because all the audience wants to hear about is “the Shetland pony with underwear, the murder that was or was not our fault – but, you know, we’re the problem.”

For all its muddy cultural avenues left unexplored, though, it at least provides a slipper view of the ways the show represented “the inception of American shock culture,” as one producer accurately describes it.

Details about the extremes to which the producers would go behind the scenes to force confrontations or cajole subjects into continuing to participate in an exercise more than a few describe as dangerously deceptive aren’t particularly surprising. Instead, Sewell could have made a more overt case out of the documentary’s warnings about the perils of giving the public what it wants.

“Fights, Camera, Action” entirely neglects the ways the show played up homophobia for ratings or its lingering influence on how the public perceives transgender men and women. (That said, the queer community’s relationship with “Springer” can be conflicted, since it was among the first popular shows to afford visibility to same-sex relationships and trans people.)

Examining the show’s proximity to a murder case must have been an easier approach since most true crime isn’t particularly nuanced. The “Springer” episode around which the second half of the documentary is constructed aired in 2000, a couple of years after the show’s popularity peaked. It involved a woman named Eleanor confronting another woman her boyfriend Ralf Panitz was cheating with: his ex-wife Nancy Campbell-Panitz. Sometime after they appeared on the show, Ralf murdered Nancy.

Her son Jeffrey relates his mother’s story and wonders whether anyone involved with “The Jerry Springer Show” has ever been held accountable for the pain they’ve caused.

It's a fair question, but the documentary never adequately spells out why that'll never happen. We are simply too in love with the crass and the coarse to let go of it, even if that addiction contributes to the undoing of political and social civility.

But those tendencies were within us years before Dominick became one of TV's most consequential producers. "Fights, Camera, Action" features an excerpt of a 1988 interview with the woman whose toaster is allegedly possessed by Satan, featured on the "Today" show. When Dominick asks her why she’s kept the appliance, she answers, “Well, Richard, when all is said and done, it makes good toast.” And that's America for you. 

"Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action" is currently streaming on Netflix.