The Jerry Springer Show
Advertisements:
$60 Million
“All of us, whether or not we’re celebrities, everyone ought to spend part of their life making someone else’s life better.” From politics to reality television, Jerry Springer has done it all over the last five decades. He started his career as a lawyer turned news presenter and politician before he ventured into television as the host of the tabloid talk show, The Jerry Springer Show, which aired from 1991 to 2018. Now overseeing The Jerry Springer Podcast and his new courtroom series, Judge Jerry, let’s take a closer look at the 75-year-old’s varied career!
1940s to Stardom
Gerald Norman Springer was born on February 13, 1944, in London, England to Jewish refugees. At the age of five, he emigrated to the United States with his parents and called Queens, New York home. He was drawn to politics at an early age after seeing John F. Kennedy at the 1956 Democratic National Convention. Knowing one day he would pursue a political career, he graduated from Forest Hills High School and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Tulane University in 1965. Three years later, he earned his law degree from Northwestern University.
Springer was hired on as a political campaign adviser to Robert F. Kennedy. After the assassination, he joined a local Cincinnati law firm and spent several years practicing law before he ran for Congress in 1970. Although he lost the seat to the Republican incumbent, Springer made a lasting impression and was elected to the Cincinnati City Council in 1971. He resigned in 1974 after admitting to hiring a prostitute and spent the next few years rebuilding his career before he won his seat back and was elected Mayor by the City Council in 1977.
Springer’s involvement in local politics continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s as he sought the Democratic nomination for the Governor of Ohio. However, after he failed to win the nomination, he put his political career on hold and turned his attention to journalism. “NBC offered me a job to anchor their news on the NBC affiliate there in Cincinnati, figuring that if I had been a councilman and mayor for 10 years that I knew the city and therefore might have some credibility,” he said. “So, I never even thought about it, but they offered me the job and I didn’t know yet if I would run again for another office or something like that. So, I figured I’d give it a shot. And, basically, that’s how I got into it: it was handed to me. I wasn’t so interested in anchoring; I was more interested in doing political commentary.”
Springer worked a deal where he would anchor the news and then offer a two-minute commentary at the end of every newscast. The segment became one of the top favorites in Cincinnati, which led Springer to his next big break—his own talk show. The Jerry Springer Show debuted in September 1991 as a politically oriented talk show. By 1994, the show struggled in the ratings, which led the network to rework the series in light of Phil Donahue’s retirement. There was finally room for another daytime talk show.
“One day the CEO of multimedia took me to lunch and said, ‘Phil is going to retire, and we’re going to start a new talk show, and you’re going to host it,’” Springer recalled. “So, I was assigned it as an employee. It wasn’t anything that I ever had any interest in. I can’t even remember ever watching daytime talk shows. I mean, if you were grown up and you had a job, you probably were working during the day, and it’s just nothing I had any particular interest in. And so that, too, was handed to me. So, I’ve had this lucky life, where the only job I ever applied for was running for mayor. But short of that, everything else has been, in a sense, handed to me.”
As The Jerry Springer Show morphed into a dramatic daytime talk show based on tabloid sensationalism, Springer became a household name known for confronting guests on topics like adultery, prostitution, and other controversial situations. By the late 1990s, the show beat The Oprah Winfrey Show in many cities and marked the height of Springer’s career as he perfected his on-air talent for expecting the unexpected. Fortunately, Springer’s approach worked as the show ran for 27 seasons before it wrapped in July 2018.
“I’m not allowed to know what the show is about,” Springer said of how the show ran. “The only thing I get handed is the card that you see me carrying around during the show. But all the card has on it are the names of the guests, because I haven’t met them, I don’t know who they are. So, my job is to ask questions that you would ask sitting at home watching, and then make jokes… I’m always trying to think of quips and how to make this lighter and funny or whatever. And that’s what I’m paid to do… If they told me ahead of time what’s going to be presented, then any reaction I had would be fake because I would already know what’s going to happen. It would look awful. So, this is much better and it keeps me more engaged.”
Life After The Jerry Springer Show
After decades of putting people at ease and entertaining audiences, Springer wrapped up The Jerry Springer Show in July 2018. “Honestly, it is not a difficult job,” the television veteran said. “I’ve had real jobs in life. Being mayor, that’s a real job. Being a journalist, that’s a real job. Being a talk show host, you’re the maître d’ at a restaurant who’s just showing people to their seats and making sure everyone’s okay. It’s just not a difficult job and I don’t want to make it seem like it’s really big… My three lines are: ‘You did what?’ ‘Come on out!’ ‘We’ll be right back.’ If you can say those three lines, you can be a talk show host.a”
Although his daytime talk show came to an end, Springer refused to slow down and turned his attention to his podcast, The Jerry Springer Podcast. The 75-year-old is also set to return to television in Fall 2019 in a new courtroom show titled Judge Jerry. If the past is any way to predict the future, we have no doubt the show will be another hit for the former lawyer and politician turned talk show host!
->
