Why true crime lovers should watch the Jerry Springer doc

Despite never having seen a full episode of the show, ‘Jerry Springer’ evokes a strange kind of nostalgia in me. In my case, it’s mainly the memory of flipping through channels towards my favorite cartoons, and pausing in shock for a moment at the channel where Jerry had people fighting on stage. It was intense back then, but nowadays you can't imagine that such things were allowed to escalate on TV. If a participant in a reality show uses violence these days, they are immediately removed from the program. But with Jerry Springer, anything went.

When the name comes up, everyone immediately says ‘oh yes!’ with a smile, but it wasn't so fun on stage and backstage.

In the new Netflix docu, we finally see how things really went down behind the scenes. Because just like in front of the cameras, it wasn't exactly pleasant there. The staff were present about six days a week for twelve to fourteen hours a day, searching for the most shocking stories. To keep this up, some used drugs like speed. You can imagine that this didn't make things any more pleasant. And that was exactly what they needed to hype their guests as much as possible.

After the filming of an episode, something horrific happened to one of the guests.

The word ‘spoiler’ is really not fitting for the part of the docu that I'm now trying to skirt around. Something truly horrific happened as a result of an episode of the ‘Jerry Springer Show’. You could best label this docu as ’true crime’, with a touch of ‘wow, it can really get that intense in the TV world’ when you look at how the staff were treated. The docu consists of two episodes of 50 minutes each and is available for streaming on Netflix.

Image: Netflix