“I had a guy who was a Satanist and he had a blood fetish,” Yoshimura continues. “He wanted to come on and drink blood. So I said, ‘You can come on, but you can’t drink blood. You can’t cut yourself.’ I remember him saying, ‘OK, I won’t cut myself, I won’t drink blood.’ And then on stage, he’s cutting himself. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I told him not to do it.’”
Yoshimura’s own boundaries were pushed when a man called in, asking to come on the show with his sister. “So I had to get him to tell me what the story was,” Yoshimura says. “He said, ‘I’ve been sleeping with my sister.’ So then I had a follow-up question: ‘Who’s been the top and who’s been the bottom?’ He said, ‘I’m the top.’ So this is really happening. I said, ‘Who’s your sister?’ He said, ‘The woman on the phone with you.’”
What did Yoshimura do? “I thought, ‘I’m going to put them on the show, but I’m going to front-load it with a lot of jokes about incest.’ I remember the audience going: ‘Oooh!’ And then the sister walks in. And she’s a very attractive woman. I remember thinking, ‘Man, this is going to be really weird.’ The guy was a total creep. He was like a 400lb, 6ft 6in weirdo. He had this very stoic, deadpan look on his face. And she was just a normal girl. She was smiling and laughing. I remember thinking, ‘Man, this is really messed up.’ But they seemed happy. They were holding hands on stage. She got pregnant, and they were happy about it. And I’m like, ‘Well, I guess they’re happy.’”
Yoshimura’s feelings about the show are complicated. “I loved it,” he says. “I loved the adrenaline, I loved the challenge, I loved the people and I loved the storytelling. I loved it. I can’t believe I got to do it. But then when I think about it now, I go: ‘What the hell was I doing?’”
He still keeps in touch with some of the guests. “I’ve always been a guy who likes to collect friends,” he says. Many of them, he says, are doing well. “I feel like they were born to be on that show. It was their moment.”
Would the show be possible today? Yoshimura thinks so. “I think the audience would be a lot more sophisticated,” he says. “But I think it could still be successful.” Sewell is less sure. “I don’t know what the next Jerry Springer Show is. I think we’re in a different era now.”
But the show’s legacy is clear. “It was the beginning of reality TV,” says Sewell. “It was the first show to really push the boundaries of what we could put on TV. It was the beginning of the end of the civilised era of talkshows. It was the beginning of the end of civilisation, I guess.”
“But then they left and they went back to their lives. They were in control of their own lives before, they were in control of their own lives after.”
Has she ever had any regrets about her time on the show? “I never do,” she says. “I’m proud of my work and I’m proud of the fact that I was able to create stories that people wanted to watch. If I had pushed somebody into something they didn’t want to do, I would probably feel differently about it, but that was never the case. They may not have liked the end result, but they were in control.”
Yoshimura, more conflicted, used to have nightmares – “in my dreams, I was still producing The Jerry Springer Show and I was still responsible for the same people” – but now he’s more at peace with it. “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to be, but I am,” he says. “I feel like I contributed to something that was a helpful thing for some people who needed it.” He believes he did more good than harm, and he’s grateful for the experience. “It was a wild ride, man. I’m so lucky to have been there.”
Chait Mele, too, doesn’t regret it. “It was fun. It was an adventure,” she says. “It was a lot of pressure, but, man, it was a lot of fun. I always say: ‘I’ve had a lot of jobs. I’ve had a lot of fun jobs, but that was the most fun job I ever had.’”
She left in 2000, when she was pregnant with her first child. “I thought: ‘I can’t be doing this anymore.’ I mean, I was 42 years old, it was time to grow up. But I’m not sorry I did it. I learned a lot.”
Yoshimura can still feel the adrenaline rush of being backstage at the show. “It was like being in the circus,” he says. “You never knew what was going to happen. You never knew what was going to be thrown at you. And you never knew what was going to be thrown back. It was a really fun experience. The adrenaline was really part of the high.”
Would he do it again? “I would,” he says, “without a doubt.”
“Pueden mostrar realmente lo enojados y furiosos que se sentían … creo que Jerry realmente los ayudó, aunque fue un programa explosivo”.
Chait Mele también cree que el programa jugó un papel cultural en “una relajación de la contención de las cosas. Creo que la gente pudo expresarse más abiertamente, más molesta, más en tu cara”. ¿Hay una línea directa de Springer a Trump? En ese momento, señala, Trump fue rápido para iniciar disputas públicas, “así que también fue parte de este avance hacia que fuera aceptable decir cosas horribles a los demás, solo decir lo que se te ocurra”. Yoshimura agrega: “Creo que Trump allanó el camino para Trump. No creo que tuviéramos nada que ver con eso”.
Los invitados no solo fueron acosados por Springer, sino también por la audiencia, un precursor de la turba en línea. “Es aquí donde creo que The Jerry Springer Show realmente fue una gran parte de un cambio en la forma en que las personas se comportan en público entre sí”, dice Chait Mele. ¿Se arrepiente ella de su participación en eso? “No, no realmente. Sé que suena como una contradicción, pero estoy muy orgullosa de mi tiempo allí. No me arrepiento de mis programas”.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action se estrena en Netflix el 7 de enero
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