A Ghost Hunter's Notebook by Amanda Springer

The easy rejoinder is that Springer’s wildly successful show made sport of those people and mainstreamed their exploitation. Doing this job for this long without liking people - on their level, not as an abstract concept - would make for a long three decades. There is a point there: Springer, especially in the early years of his show, seemed to engage with his guests, however outrageous. In this light, he was doing a daytime-TV version of what “Roseanne” had done in prime time a few years earlier. What’s more, other ordinary people cared about them, by the millions.

The pretty, respectful-remembrance version of this history is to say that Springer pushed against TV’s elitist norms of propriety to make the case that ordinary people, in all their mess, were important. Simpson trial, the reality-TV era and, eventually, certain presidential debates. His name became a verb, a shorthand for a shameless sensibility that would continue through the O.J. TV Guide voted “The Jerry Springer Show” the worst show in TV history, and the program embraced that accolade in its introduction, which also boasted of “No Golden Globes, no Emmys, no respect.” He mocked his critics’ spells of the vapors, arguing that he was just presenting reality, warts and all. The people, or his selected, outlandish version of them, rolled in: mother-daughter dominatrixes, people who had self-amputated various body parts, a man who married a horse.

Springer, who died on Thursday at 79, rolled out his talk show like a bountiful and pungent wheel of cheese and threw the studio doors open for the messy feast. Or you could have watched cultural populism play out on “The Jerry Springer Show,” weekdays from 1991 to 2018. You can find evidence of this in political-science texts or op-ed pages or histories of the Andrew Jackson administration. America’s populace can be its most powerful force and its most terrifying danger.

A Ghost Hunter's Notebook by Amanda Springer