Talking Trash

By JAMES COLLINS

Last month on the Jerry Springer Show, just after one of the program's famous brawls and just before it cut to a commercial, a woman held a sonogram of her fetus up to the camera. For this most intimate image--a tiny figure in a woman's womb--to appear in the midst of another Springer spectacle was shocking. More than that, the incident marked the arrival on the program of what might be called the Forgotten Guest. One reason the show is so dramatic is that Springer brings out everyone involved in the affair at hand--all the secret lovers: male, female and transsexual. But even though pregnant women are a staple on the show, it's not usual for a child-to-be to appear. This time one did, reminding us that it would soon be arriving into the lives of the people throwing chairs at one another onstage.

The rise of the Jerry Springer Show is one of the wonders of the age. A year ago, its ratings were mediocre, but since then they have improved 183%. In February it became the first syndicated talk show to beat Oprah since that show became No. 1 in 1987. What makes this so remarkable is that Oprah had been routing the competition handily for so many years. In March 1995, for example, when the Ricki Lake show peaked, it had a Nielsen rating of 6.1; at the same time Oprah's rating was 8.8. Now both Springer and Oprah have ratings of 7.8.

What explains Jerry Springer's success? No doubt someone has a Theory of All Squalor stating that as politics becomes entertainment, and entertainment becomes reality, and reality becomes politics, then the leap from Monica Lewinsky to Jerry Springer is, well, something or other. Less ambitiously, we can offer this explanation: the fights. At the end of 1996, Multimedia, the company that syndicated the Springer Show, was sold and became part of the company now called USA Networks Studios. The USA executives were more liberal about what went on the air. Fights had often occurred but had been edited out; now they take up a large portion of every broadcast, and they clearly are not staged. The public can't get enough. Indeed, a Springer video showing back-to-back fights, along with cursing and nudity censored from the show, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Springer, 54, launched his talk show in 1991, having served as mayor of Cincinnati in his early 30s and then anchoring a local news show there. With curly red hair, round glasses and slightly nasal voice, he has a style that is less empathic than Phil Donahue's and less excitable than Geraldo Rivera's. He's the intelligent, slightly smarmy observer of the antics around him. This is the peak of his career, but that doesn't mean he's getting as rich as Winfrey. Major advertisers like Procter & Gamble shun his show, which can charge only about a third of what Oprah does.

Of course, Springer stands on the shoulders of giants. Long before his show became a hit, Donahue and Winfrey were walking around the audience while their guests shared their personal tales. Lake, whose show debuted in 1993, refined the formula by adding confrontation. With her success came a clutch of imitators and a new round of fretting about trash television. But with all the competition, ratings began to decline, and by 1996, hosts like Rivera and Lake were taking the pledge to become more high-minded. They were encouraged by the experience of Jenny Jones, one of whose guests murdered another. These shifts and the success of Rosie O'Donnell heralded a new era of niceness, or so it was believed. In fact, a nastiness vacuum had been created, and Springer was there to fill it.

No one who is honest would deny that his show can be entertaining. But it is also--what are the right words? Horrible? Disgusting? It is disgusting because it parades real people before the mob as objects of ridicule. Of course, Springer says the show is "silly" and "outrageous" and a "cultural cartoon" and so shouldn't be taken too seriously. "Most people get the joke," says Steve Rosenberg, president of TV distribution for USA. "It's crazy and funny, like World Wrestling." He is quick to add that there's nothing fake about it--and that's exactly the problem. The Jerry Springer Show is like pro wrestling, except that the eye gougings, physical and emotional, are authentic. This is a joke?

The experiences of Nikki, a guest who talked to TIME after a recent taping, were not so hilarious. An unemployed high school dropout from Tampa, Fla., Nikki is 20 and has been married to Chico, 27, for less than a month. A few weeks ago, a producer for Springer called and asked if she wanted to appear. She had seen the show only a couple of times, and was skeptical because the producer wouldn't be specific about why they wanted her. That is typical, since the show depends on surprises. The producer pressed on, reassuring her that the experience would be positive. By the end of the phone call, Nikki had reluctantly agreed to appear. "I said I would do it as long as I didn't feel everyone was staring at me."

At the taping, Nikki learned two things about Chico she hadn't known before: that he was still seeing his ex-girlfriend Mindy and that he had a second lover--Rick. She encountered them both on camera, naturally, and Mindy assaulted her. Afterward, Nikki talked about what she'd just gone through. "I wanted to cry onstage," she said in a quiet voice, "but I held it in. I didn't want to look all soft and gullible. All I want to do now is sit by myself and cry." Her feelings were mixed, though. "It wasn't a bad experience," she said. "I'd come back. In some ways, it was a relief. I got to find out the whole truth with no holding back." To help patch things up with Chico, which she still thinks is possible, she may accept the show's offer to pay for counseling (only a tiny number of people do so). Guests are not paid, but they get a free trip to Chicago, where the show has its studio, and Nikki enjoyed riding the el and going out on the town with Chico the day before the taping. "I really loved our time here," she says.

Ask Springer if he believes, in his heart, that his guests are humiliating themselves, and he will call the question elitist. "If we think it's someone who we think didn't go to Harvard," he says, "all of a sudden we say, 'Oh, poor them! We shouldn't let them go on TV because they may embarrass themselves. They don't know what they're doing.'" As a general proposition, this kind of populism is dangerous and phony--there are lots of ways to make suckers of people, and just because they are adults doesn't mean it's right. But more specifically, did Nikki know what she was doing?

Springer says that since his guests are so eager to be on the show, it is unlikely that someone who is vulnerable will appear. "You gotta really desperately want to be on the show to get on," he says. "You've got to call; you have to go through interviews." Nikki didn't call, though, it was Rick--Chico's lover--who first contacted the show through the 800 line it maintains for would-be guests. Nikki was roped in later and only talked briefly to producers. Richard Dominick, Springer's executive producer, says the show protects guests by giving them a standard list of 25 secrets that could be revealed. "If they mark no to any one of them," he says, "even if it's not their secret, then we don't use them as a guest." Nikki was never explicitly asked about the list, though; someone handed it to her before the taping. Springer himself admits, "They see the list, but they never believe it's really going to be that."

Maybe the most important thing that Nikki did not know, and that Springer did, is that the audience would regard her with such contempt. "It's white trailer trash! I love it!" said Paul Unger, a farmer who had flown in from Oregon. An 81-year old grandmother named Sophie, who had driven from Indiana with her granddaughter, said, "I hope they fight. They better fight." Springer says the audience is not "laughing at" the guests. So it's a display of sympathy when the crowd chants "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" after a woman tells her boyfriend she's pregnant by another man?

Which brings us back to those children-to-be. Time and again, the women on the show are pregnant, sometimes several months along, but instead of being taken seriously, their condition is used to spice up the scandal--"Paternity results: I slept with two brothers!" The crowd roars when a pregnant woman socks somebody. Meanwhile, the important questions are hardly ever asked: Who is going to support this baby? How is he or she going to survive its parents' bickering and entanglements? With his approach, Springer fosters a reckless (and vile) attitude toward having babies, and the children of his guests will suffer as a result. This is a joke?

--With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago and William Tynan/New York