Word: springers
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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...
...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...
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...
...rippled from hair follicles to bowel, it seemed to me that maybe the end of civilization as we know it isn't such a bad idea. After all, in our long, tedious march of regress have we earthlings really accomplished much besides spewing garbage, ammunition and the Jerry Springer Show into the environment? Wouldn't it set a nice example if we could just for once accept the inevitable and issue a press release reading, "Hey, we gave it our best shot, but we really weren't up to this existence business, so we're out of here...
Other Presidents had an anchorman aura: authoritative, a bit square. Clinton has the urgency of a talk-show host. Or guest ("I want everyone to want me"--today on Jerry Springer). He is the first boyfriend (rather than father) figure in the White House since Jack Kennedy. Bye-bye, Poppy; hello, Elvis. That was the cue for the Southern beau-hunk to go on strutting his sex appeal, occasionally swiveling his ideology and forever crooning his ballads: "For I can't help/ Falling in love with...