‘Nothing was off-limits’ on ‘The Jerry Springer Show’: ‘It pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable,’ Netflix documentary director says.

Mention The Jerry Springer Show and most people will have some association even if they didn’t live through that era of trash TV. The outrageous guests. The brawls and flying chairs. The profanity, nudity and adultery. The audience’s “Jerry!” chant. But seeing the show’s full history laid bare in a new, two-part Netflix docuseries, makes it all a lot darker.

“It pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable or not acceptable on TV, like nothing that had gone before it,” Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action director Luke Sewell told Yahoo Entertainment. “And, ultimately, it changed TV forever.”

What’s the docuseries about?

Producers who helmed the tawdry show, which ran from 1991 to 2018, pull back the curtain on its inner workings. No surprise: It was all about ratings (beat Oprah!) and became a cutthroat competition to one-up the last episode, booking guests that included a man practicing bestiality, people in incestuous relationships and white supremacists. Guests were hyped up by producers before going onstage, where teeth got knocked out, people lost chunks of scalp and fingernails were ripped off. Following the show, guests were sent packing with no counseling after, in some cases, seeing their lives blown up on TV.

“It felt like nothing was off-limits, and that’s what the show thrived on,” Sewell said. “It was a show that was predicated on outrage, and that’s ultimately the trap that they got in. They had to keep outdoing themselves and keep going more and more overboard and crazy.”

Executive producer Richard Dominick revisited running the show for 14 years and giving viewers what they wanted: fights. The docuseries surfaces an old clip of him saying he’d execute someone on TV for ratings. Producers under him — Toby Yoshimura, Melinda Chait Mele and Annette Grundy — discussed their “scary” boss, whom they compared to a mob boss, and the toxic workplace environment. They worked around the clock to book the most outrageous guests and feared they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t deliver ratings.

Sewell called Dominick “the architect” of the raucous show. “It was his vision.”

A part that didn’t make it into the doc, Sewell said, was when he asked Dominick about his past “execution” comment — and if he would give a different answer today.

“He sits there and he’s like: ‘Would I think differently? No, I think I would still do that,’” Sewell said. “I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, and I think that’s why … people sort of found him terrifying because they never quite knew where they stood with him and how much of a role he was playing or how much he was this guy.”

While the show gave people permission to say whatever they wanted to say, “its roots are a fundamental [of] human nature. The Roman Colosseum,” Sewell said. “It was nothing new in a sense, just a repackaging of it, and it just took someone like Richard to have the balls to do it.”

Was Springer asked to be in the docuseries prior to his death?

The doc was in the pipeline prior to Springer’s death in April 2023. Sewell said that at the end of 2022, they had conversations with Springer’s team about him participating, but he ended up declining. After Springer’s death, it was revealed he had secretly been battling pancreatic cancer.

While Springer’s name was on the show, the doc suggested he played the part of being blissfully unaware of how the sausage was made while amassing his $60 million fortune. He played the eye-rolling, exasperated ringmaster of the circus.

“He was sort of detached,” Sewell said. “It’s also very important to say that the producers were quite protective of him, and lots of people had a lot of good stuff to say. He was well-liked.”

Springer was a politician before he hosted his eponymous show. While on the Cincinnati City Council in 1974, he resigned over a sex scandal. He was later elected Cincinnati mayor. The docuseries also resurfaces a 1998 sex scandal when Springer was hosting his show — involving an alleged threesome with at least one former guest — a story that barely made a ripple in the headlines at the time.

Today, “it would be [another] ‘council moment,’” Sewell said of Springer’s sex scandal during the talk show. “But it just didn’t register” at the time.

Which former guests’ stories get revisited?

The doc looks back at many of the guests — including the man who said he was “married” to his Shetland pony and kissed it with tongue in what became a banned episode — but the most compelling was the story of Nancy Campbell-Panitz, who was murdered by her ex-husband, Ralf Panitz, in 2000 after they appeared on the show.

Nancy’s son, Jeffrey Campbell, said in an interview that his mom was naive going on the show. She had an on-off relationship with Panitz and hoped they’d reunite. While they spent the night before the taping together, Panitz told her on-air in an episode called “Secret Mistresses Confronted” that he married someone else.

“From the start, it was very important that we tell Nancy’s story and give her a voice,” Sewell said. “It’s an incredibly traumatic story. Jeffrey was incredibly brave, eloquent and generous in giving us his time, and I think he did a remarkable job.”

Campbell claimed producers wanted his mom to get into a physical altercation with the new wife, who was there, but she walked off the set instead. When Campbell-Panitz refused to return to set, producers told her they wouldn’t pay for her travel home. She walked around Chicago with no money until a Good Samaritan bought her a bus ticket home to Florida. Campbell said she never heard from anyone on the show again.

Two months later, Panitz was drinking in a bar when the episode aired. He became enraged, allegedly because a judge barred him from living in a house Campbell-Panitz owned, and he beat and strangled his ex-wife. Panitz was convicted of second-degree murder in 2002.

“It’s important to state that Ralf murdered Nancy,” Sewell said. That said, “It was widely discussed at the time: What was the show’s responsibility in it? Jeffrey very much felt that they weren’t looking after his mum, and that was the last thing on their minds.”

In archival clips, Springer initially said he didn’t even remember Campbell-Panitz being on his show. He maintained that the couple being on the show had nothing to do with Campbell-Panitz’s murder. (The judge in the criminal case slammed the show for prioritizing ratings over “the dignity of human life.”)

Did Springer have regrets?

“Jerry’s whole defense of ‘It’s just TV’ — that was his whole thing through the series — ended up being quite an effective way of deflecting any criticism,” Sewell said. “He was very good at brushing it off. But of course the treatment of Nancy and things, it’s not just TV. You have a responsibility, and I think they were found lacking in terms of duty of care. … It was lower down their list of priorities than ratings.”

Just prior to Springer’s death, in November 2022, Springer apologized for having “ruined culture” with his show. Did it seem sincere?

While Sewell felt Springer’s remarks were delivered in a jokey way, he said journalist Robert Feder, who covered the show, interviewed the players and appears in the doc, felt “there wasn’t a day that went by, particularly toward the end of [Springer’s] career, that he didn’t know he was responsible for this pretty terrible show that really contributed absolutely nothing to society,” Sewell said. “A show that arguably contributed a few negative things to society. So, it’s difficult to know. But he was a bright guy. He made a deal with the devil ultimately.”

Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is streaming on Netflix.

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