Introducing... Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey there, my name is Jodi Avergan. Have you noticed the present day? It feels pretty rocky. Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians, Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. Pushkin. Hey fiasco listeners, it's your host, Leon Naefach. As you know, if you've listened to any of the shows in this feed, I've always been fascinated by stories where you can't quite tell who the good guys are supposed to be, but there's more than meets the eye and where black and white gives way to lots and lots of gray area. That's why my latest show, which I'm going to share with you in a minute, is about the life and times of Jerry Springer. You may think you know Springer, widely known as the king of trash TV, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions and vicious onstage fights. But before his show made him infamous all over the world, before he became a symbol of cultural decline, Springer was an idealist with ambitions to make his mark not in the entertainment industry, but in the world of politics. Springer lived a fascinating and poorly understood life, one that I found surprisingly relatable after conducting dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew him best. The show that came out of those interviews examines Springer's struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Along the way, I unpack what the Jerry Springer show revealed not only about his character, but about the millions of people who watched it. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by the New Yorker, the economist and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves and how we transcend them or don't. I'm about to play you a clip from the first episode of Final Thoughts. If you want to listen to the whole series, just look for Final Thoughts Jerry Springer wherever you get your podcasts. Or if you want to binge all episodes of the show right now, add free, you can do so by subscribing to Audible. I hope you check it out. In 1998, Jerry Springer published an autobiography called Ringmaster. At the beginning of the book, Springer envisions himself at the pearly gates, face to face with God. The premise is that Springer will tell God his life story and God will decide whether he belongs in heaven or hell. In the end, God let Springer go back down to earth, proclaiming him an unfinished work and urging him to keep fighting the good fight against elitists who would suppress freedom. When Jerry Springer died in April of 2023, the first line of his New York Times obituary credited him with setting a new standard for todriness on American television. It closed with a quote from Springer himself, If I Get to Heaven, we're all going. Behind the joke was a life guided by conflicting ambitions and values that even some of Springer's closest friends didn't know how to reconcile. He was a moralist, but also a nihilist. A comedian, but also a foreign policy wonk. The host of the so-called worst TV show of all time and a would-be leader of men who dreamed of making a positive impact on the world. So what impact did Jerry Springer make on the world? What did his show do to the people who watched it, not to mention the people who were on it and the people who helped make it? The Jerry Springer show is television without its makeup on. It is no different than anything else on TV other than we are not trying to make ourselves pretty. A lot of people wanted to come on the Jerry Springer show and a lot of people wanted to watch it. So what do I have to be ashamed of? Whether you like it or not, this show stuck with us. It hit a nerve and lodged itself into our collective memory. Even if you never watched it, you remember it and recognize it as a step along the way to wherever we are now. How did that happen? And how did Jerry Springer of all people turn out to be the guy who led us down that road? He is certainly one of the many co-conspirators of the world I think we live in now. I don't blame him for it, but was he a participant in it and a co-conspirator in it? Absolutely. From the Jerry Springer that I heard about that was Mayor and other things he was about to the Jerry Springer that I saw on the show, it was like two different people. Our goal in this series is not to render judgment on whether Jerry Springer deserved to go to hell for his TV show or even to try to resolve his apparent contradictions. Rather, it's to tell a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves and how we transcend them or don't. I'm Leon Nefak from Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. This is Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer. I hope you enjoyed that preview of Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer. If you want to hear more about it, please leave a comment below. If you want to hear more of the show, follow Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, wherever you get your podcasts. Or if you want to hear the whole show right now, add free, head to Audible and subscribe. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.