Everybody remembers Jerry Springer and the wild talk show that bore his name. Netflix’s new series Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is an entertaining, if a little empty behind-the-scenes documentary, writes Luke Buckmaster.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action: Limited Series
Was The Jerry Springer Show a carnival? A pre-social media race to the bottom? The contemporary equivalent of a Colosseum death match? Netflix’s two-part documentary series tosses around labels and vantage points, coming to terms with a legendarily raucous production famously devoid of any kind of moral standards—filled with randy rubes, slobbering boors, and that dude who pashed his horse. Director Luke Sewell finds a way to have his cake and eat it too, fishing through the entrails and sloshing around in the cesspool while reminding us that he’s above the material, periodically cutting to a media commentator for added cultural context.
Like the show itself, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action has a watch-through-the-slits-of-your-fingers appeal. You can’t help but want more—another nugget of toxicity to widen your eyes and slacken your jaws. Are American media personalities even capable of blushing anymore? Sewell frames the mild-mannered host as a fundamentally decent person who you might say lost his way, were it not for the fact that he was a savvy operator, and knew exactly what hillbilly highway he was heading down, taking an easy route to fame and fortune.
There are no heroes in this story, and all the winners and losers. There is however an instigator, the person who made it all happen: producer Richard Dominick, who reminded me of Faye Dunaway’s character from Sidney Lumet’s prophetic masterpiece Network. Everything’s about market share, and ratings, and more ratings, the ends always justifying the means. Before you know it, you’re in a death spiral, and Oprah Winfrey is zinging you with lines like: “Confessing and baring your soul is one thing. Baring your penis is another.”
While Springer took an extremely libertarian view—I hate Nazis, he said, but this is America and I’ll die for their right to be heard, etcetera—Dominick is more like an ethical black pit, no light or shade getting in. We assume he believes that if they didn’t do it, somebody else would: not quite the words you want on your tombstone.
We also assume Dominick might leap towards a justification that what he really did was put a mirror to the world: an ugly part of it, admittedly, and a funhouse mirror, sure, but a reflection nonetheless. But we assume too much and the show doesn’t do a great job getting inside his head, despite Dominick coming across as the sort of character who wouldn’t mind such prying, and would have an answer for everything, maybe even relish the argy-bargy.
Fights, Camera, Action is well paced and over all too soon in a two episode arc feeling quite brief and stingy. Particularly because many interesting tangents are left unexplored, and interesting questions unraised—including obvious ones relating to then versus now. Is American television more depraved than ever? Has the rise of social media pushed all those animal kissers and incestophiles elsewhere? Are they now content creators? What are the ethics of platforming, or no-platforming, problematic views and how have they changed over time? Avenues like these could’ve added real meat to the bone, made the show more than souped-up behind-the-scenes reel. They would’ve required an intellectual perspective.
Sewell however is content with maintaining a narrow scope and gorging on juicy BTS details. We learn for example (though this hardly comes as a surprise) that guests were revved up before the cameras rolled, the beasts poked with a stick, not just encouraged to let rip but fed actual lines during raucous rehearsals. In the words of one producer: “You start a shit fight…then you send them out on stage.” Dominick insisted that nobody bring anything to him “that’s not going to be interesting with the sound turned off,” which reminded me of something Hitchcock said, a few rungs higher up on the high/low art ladder, about the universality of visual language (“I try to make films where they don’t have to read the subtitles in Japan”).
Oh, and did you know that Springer himself participated in a threesome, with guests from the show? Maybe all that salacity rubbed off on him. Maybe it rubbed off on us too. How The Jerry Springer Show changed us, if it changed us, are tough and chewy conversations, outside the show’s grasp. In the eyes of the filmmakers, a better question is: where’s that guy and his horse?
