The Jerry Springer Show is a television talk show that has aired during the morning hours of many syndicated TV stations since the late 1990s. It is ostensibly a show where troubled (or dysfunctional) families come to talk about their problems with a studio audience, presumably so that the audience can offer suggestions on what can be done to resolve their situations. The show is hosted by Jerry Springer, a former politician.
In actuality, The Jerry Springer Show has come to epitomize the so-called "trash TV talk show," as each episode of the show focuses on lurid topics that usually deal with sex, racism, marital jealousy, and other prurient subjects. Typical topics of discussion on the show include unusual extra-marital affairs, vicious rivalries between families, rebellious and promiscuous teenagers, strippers and adult movie stars, and the like.
The "discussion" of each episode's subject usually involves an insult-laden verbal exchange between members of the studio audience and the featured "guests" on the show, who trade barbs throughout the length of the episode. Host Springer wraps up each show with a moralizing sermon on the subject entitled "Jerry's Final Thought", often finishing his speech with "Take care of yourself and of each other".
Ratings on the show skyrocketed when Springer featured representatives of a white supremacist group. The hostile confrontation between the "guests" and the studio audience quickly came to blows, and Springer himself suffered minor injuries as the TV station security cleared the stage. Since then, critics of the show charge, the Jerry Springer Show has encouraged its guests to attack one another and display more on-air fisticuffs, to keep the show's ratings high.
In its heyday the show was quite popular, so much so that it sparked a host of imitation talk shows (all named after their hosts), including Montel Williams, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich, and others. The popularity of the "trash TV" talk shows led to a decline in the number of game shows that had traditionally been broadcast on weekday mornings.
