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Discourse 25.3 (2003) 90-114



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Life in the Bleep-Cycle:

Inventing Id -TV on the Jerry Springer Show

[W]e were never going to be the "next" Donahue. We were becoming the first Jerry Springer!
—Springer and Morton 90

American1 talk television has cut a significant swathe across the broadcasting landscape. As a genre it is one of the most extensively syndicated and franchised media forms world-wide. American talk shows have long been pre-eminent not only in the massive export of multiple products, but also as genre-setting influences in the relatively recent proliferation of home-grown American-style talk shows in other countries. Moreover, American talk show hosts are not only household names across a "global communication village," but some have become figures whose personal iconic status is matched or at least approached by staggering economic capital (both in terms of personal wealth and corporate industry). For instance, Harpo, the multi-stranded empire of Oprah Winfrey, not only produces her talk show, but is involved in a considerable range of media, educational and charitable ventures. Finally, the talk show is, in itself, both central to and has been formative in the growing and global industry of constructed reality television.

In the evolution of talk television, the Jerry Springer Show has a distinctive place in three respects. First it is a hybrid genre drawing [End Page 90] not only on the traditional talk show form (long theorised as a feminized space) but also on other cultural genres. These include an odd mixture of seemingly incompatible forms from the "camp" choreographies of professional wrestling and cartoon animation (see, for example, Gamson, Freaks Talk Back) to the prurient, masculinized sensibilities of the dogfight or mud wrestling. Second, and as a result, the talk show can no longer be properly described (if it ever could) as a singular genre. The advent of the Jerry Springer Show, oft described as the worst of "trash," "tabloid" or "lowest common denominator" television and widely received as a kind of anti-Oprah, confirms and consolidates a perceived dispersal of the genre into subtypes. It can be argued that there is a continuum of talk television with the vast majority of shows (both in the USA and elsewhere) falling somewhere between the Oprah and Jerry poles. If the "Oprah Sensibility" (Max) is distinctive for its "serious", pedagogical, emotionally literate, self-improvement and progressive social reform dimensions, the Jerry Springer Show has come to represent virtually the opposite tendency, emphasizing as it does, the scatological, the salacious and expulsive emotion. Third, not only is the Jerry Springer Show a composite, reflecting and deploying many genres, but it has also been an agenda-setting phenomenon in its own right. The show has had a transformative impact in the talk show arena, where we have seen a widening gap between tabloid and serious versions, with tabloid talk (for example, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Sally Jesse Raphael) looking more and more like the Jerry Springer Show. Indeed, it can be argued that the Jerry Springer Show has virtually invented the new televisual school of what could be described as "cruelty realism." This new school, whose stock in trade is humiliation and gross spectacle of and by "ordinary" people, now appears not only in globalized "constructed reality" franchises like Big Brother and Survivor (or the British Cruel Winter and Cruel Summer), but is increasingly infiltrating the range of televisual forms from the humiliation quiz show (for example, The Weakest Link), through a seemingly endless stream of fetid fly on the wall 'Uncovered'-style documentary (for example Ibiza Uncovered) to the brutalization of such fuddy-duddy shows as Blind Date (the British version of the Dating Game).

Taking the Jerry Springer Show as a case study2 , this paper elaborates on and challenges earlier assessments of the tabloid talk phenomenon. We begin by considering the resources and limitations of the talk show literature, arguing the need for a reassessment of the genre in the light of the formative...

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