Once upon a time, a young reporter named Jerry Springer made his way to Chicago with the dream of launching a talk show that allowed regular people to tell their stories. On his journey, he met a tabloid-trained producer, who turned the hopeful tv host into the Ratings King and staged increasingly dramatic antics at court through a daytime talk show that was called brilliant by some and an abomination by others. These included a fist-fight involving a klansman and a man who married his horse, but then one day, there was a murder. Some decades later, two intrepid scholars would go on a quest to learn more about this fraught empire after they found an archive entitled Fights, Camera, Action! on Netflix. They were armed only with questions like: When do people get annoyed when something is “fake,” and when are they happy to suspend disbelief? Whose stories get told and how? Where do exploitation and responsibility start and stop? And just what *was* the show Merinda’s middle school class visited?? What will become of our adventurers? Tune in and find out.

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/arts/television/jerry-springer-netflix-documentary-5-takeaways.html

“Good Sex as Food for the Revolution” by Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons via Emily Nagoski’s Substack

https://substack.com/inbox/post/155927881

“Tennessean by Birth” poem by Nikki Giovanni

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhPUvucdGvk

Ross Benes’s book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times (out April 2025)

https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700638574/

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.