“If you wanted to save whales, you called Oprah. If you slept with a whale, you called us.” This biting remark from one of the producers of The Jerry Springer Show captures the essence of the most notorious program in American television history. Although it wasn’t a sexual encounter with a whale but rather with a Shetland pony in 1998 that became a turning point for the show.

The program pioneered what came to be known as “trash TV” and even found itself embroiled in a murder case that ended up in court. These shocking events are revisited in the new Netflix documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action — a deep dive into the legacy of a program that TV Guide ranked as the worst show in television history. None of the participants interviewed in the documentary seem to have fully come to terms with their involvement in the Springer phenomenon.

In 1991, American television had one undisputed queen: Oprah Winfrey. Her talk show, filled with tearful confessions and low-stakes drama, commanded an audience of over 12 million viewers. From her perch at the top of the ratings, Oprah looked down on a sea of imitators whose only real distinction was the personality of their hosts. When The Jerry Springer Show debuted, expectations were modest at best. The host, Jerry Springer, was an affable figure with the demeanor of a college professor — the kind of neighbor who’d lend you his lawnmower without hesitation.

A former politician, Springer initially stuck to the formula of the time: sentimental stories of family reunions and personal triumphs. His show blended into the background of daytime television, offering the same fare that filled competing channels. But when NBC executives threatened to cancel the struggling program, Springer and his team made a Faustian bargain that would change television forever.

To breathe life into the failing show, the producers brought in Richard Dominick, a writer responsible for headlines about “Bigfoot’s love slave” and a toaster “possessed by the devil” in the tabloids Weekly World News and The Sun. He brought two transformative ideas that would define the show’s legacy.

The first was to elevate Jerry Springer’s on-screen persona by orchestrating raucous audience chants. Dominick instructed the crowd to leap to their feet and enthusiastically shout the host’s name as he entered. The now-iconic refrain of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” became synonymous with the show.

The second idea was far more consequential: Dominick directed the production team — mostly young, ambitious newcomers eager to leave their mark on 1990s television — to ensure that the stories were “compelling with the sound off.” This mandate led to an explosion of on-set brawls and a surprising number of gratuitous nude scenes.

Springer placed unshakable trust in Dominick’s vision. The only limit was the absence of limits. In the Netflix documentary, Dominick admits, “If I could kill someone on television, I would execute them on television.”

Nothing better encapsulates the paradigm shift in The Jerry Springer Show than the infamous 1998 episode featuring Mark, a farmer from Missouri. Mark appeared on the show to introduce the audience to his partner of 10 years, the individual he had left his wife and children for. To the astonishment of viewers, the “lucky girl” turned out to be Pixel, a Shetland pony.

Mark declared his love for Pixel, detailing their intimate relationship and even plans for a wedding. As he spoke, the show displayed photos of Pixel dressed in women’s lingerie. “When it comes to sex, we make love. We don’t make fun of each other,” Mark said.

The episode aired only on the East Coast. All the networks censored it, and the press quickly took notice. Critics called it “the most vile and grotesque freak show that’s ever been on television.” The result? Everyone wanted to see it — a textbook case of the Streisand effect. Ratings skyrocketed, and for the first time, they beat Oprah.

The producers doubled down. Soon, a trans woman who had sawed off her own legs and two siblings in love discussing their pregnancy appeared on the show. The headlines grew increasingly sensational: “I Slept with 251 Men in 10 Hours!” “I Am a 14-Year-Old Prostitute!” “I Cut Off My Penis!” At NBC headquarters, executives toasted with champagne. Ratings soared, even as critics sharpened their knives. “Showing your soul is one thing; showing your penis is another,” quipped Oprah.

The executives knew that the show was trash, “but the rating were too good to resist,” according to the documentary. While the media blamed Springer for America’s moral collapse, viewers couldn’t look away. “Sometimes people just want to kick back, let their eyes glaze over and learn about a guy who desperately wants to marry his horse. What’s a better form of escapism than that?” Danielle J. Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, told The Times

The increasingly controversial stories escalated to such levels of violence on set that a professional security team had to be hired. Chairs flew, teeth and nails followed, and women flaunted clumps of their rivals’ hair as trophies. More than one guest left the set directly for the hospital. This chaos brought Steve Wilkos, an ex-Marine, onto the show. His presence became so frequent that he eventually landed his own program.

None of the episodes were as violent as the one titled Klanfrontation, which pitted members of the Ku Klux Klan against the Jewish Defense League. The topic was particularly sensitive for Springer, the son of Holocaust survivors, born in London during the Blitz.

A moral man?

Springer was born in 1944 in a London Underground station used as a bomb shelter. His parents, German Jews, had fled to England during the Holocaust and later emigrated to the United States when Jerry was five. A brilliant student, he developed an early passion for politics, working on Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. After earning a law degree, Springer launched a promising political career that was soon marred by scandal. In 1974, The Cincinnati Enquirer revealed that Springer had frequented brothels and had been clumsy enough to pay with personal checks.

The incident did not end his political career: rather than hide, he openly admitted it. Nor did it harm his relationship with Micki Velton, whom he had recently married. They stayed together for 30 years, keeping their private life out of the media. He also fiercely protected his daughter, Katie, who was blind, partially deaf in one ear, and born without nasal passages — she was her father’s staunchest defender. Springer became mayor of Cincinnati and, before transitioning to national television, was the most beloved presenter on local TV. His charisma allowed him to remain seemingly detached from the sensationalism that surrounded him. Yet, the man hailed on his program as “the hero of the United States” was not as pure as the moralistic homilies he delivered at the end of each show suggested.

The incident with the prostitutes was not an isolated case. One morning, Springer walked into the show’s office and apologized to his staff. They were baffled, but the press soon clarified the situation. A sex tape had surfaced, showing Springer with a stripper and her stepmother — two guests of the show who had conspired to trap and blackmail him. He attempted to suppress the scandal with money, but he couldn’t stop the footage becoming public. Once again, he confronted the fallout head-on. And, once again, he emerged even stronger.

The story that marked the lowest point of The Jerry Springer Show wasn’t necessarily the most scandalous. Nancy Campbell-Panitz appeared on the show hoping to win back her ex-husband Ralph, but upon arriving, she discovered he had married someone else, Ellen, just days earlier. Confronted by her ex, she stormed off the set. A producer chased after her, but she refused to continue with the circus. She knew that the next step would be a fight, rolling on the floor, pulling each other’s hair, and trading insults.

“If you don’t come back, we won’t pay for your return ticket,” they told her. It was a common trick to convince guests, and it worked because many of them came from humble backgrounds. The production team entertained the unsuspecting guests who believed that Springer would truly solve their problems. They provided a lavish experience: a limousine, first-class flights, unlimited access to alcohol, and any substances that would lower their inhibitions. It was a lifestyle the humble guests had never dreamed of.

Nancy didn’t care about the threats. She walked in the rain to the station, where a stranger took pity on her and gave her a ride home. When the show aired a couple of months later, it was just a bad memory, and she didn’t even watch it. Her ex-husband did, however, watching the broadcast in a bar while getting drunk. “I’m going to kill her,” he said as he continued drinking. The next day, her son received a call from the police: his mother had been murdered by her ex-husband. The police issued a warrant for the arrest of Ralph and Ellen Panitz. Ellen was acquitted, but Ralph was sentenced to life in prison. He had a history of domestic violence and prior complaints from Nancy, but no one on the show seemed to care.

Judge Nancy Donnellan, who sentenced Ralph Panitz condemned the role the show had played in the incident. She claimed that The Jerry Springer Show had manipulated them to escalate the humiliation. “To Jerry Springer and his producers, I ask you: are ratings more important than the dignity of human life?” she asked. Since the answer to Judge Donnellan’s question was undoubtedly yes, the show’s machinery continued without hesitation. To distance themselves from the scandal, the entire team traveled to Jamaica to record an episode at a swingers’ resort.

The show took its toll on everyone who worked on it. Dominick subjected them to a tight 20-hour daily schedule. Tobias Yoshimura, a producer since the first show, reached his lowest point when he produced the story of a prostitute who had been abused by her father since she was a teenager. She was going to confront him live, begging him to stop calling for her services and asked not to see him until the taping. They were put up in separate hotels under false names, but when Yoshimura went to visit her to finalize the details of the next day’s show, the father opened the door, covered only in a towel. That same day Yoshimura left the show, unable to deal with it any longer.

Frightened by the growing level of scandal, the network demanded a shift in tone, leading to Dominick’s departure from the show. At the time, competition was fierce, with many networks airing formats that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier — not just testimonial shows, but also reality TV with extreme premises. Trash TV had become embedded in American culture. As television historian David Bianculli put it, the show “was lapped not only by other programs but by real life.” After 27 years as America’s favorite guilty pleasure, The Jerry Springer Show came to an end in 2018. In many ways, the show offers more insight into the current political landscape in the United States than any study by a political scientist.

Jerry Springer, who died of cancer in 2023, never renounced the show that made him a millionaire, although he admitted that he would not watch it. “Television does not and must not create values, it’s merely a picture of all that’s out there — the good, the bad, the ugly,” he told Too Hot for TV. “Believe this: The politicians and companies that seek to control what each of us may watch are a far greater danger to America and our treasured freedom than any of our guests ever were or could be.”

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Seated among the ruins of a building in Gaza City, Aws Al-Banna. 28, speaks to the camera about Natalie, his fiancée. They had planned on getting married and starting a family, “sharing a future” and “continuing to make memories.” The rubble on which he sits was once the building she lived in. “The war took her away from me. It’s taken everything from me. She died with the rest of her family in a bombing,” says Al-Banna in a videocall from a refugee camp in Khan Yunis, in the southern region of the Gaza Strip.

His story, filmed at the start of 2024 using a mobile phone, is one of the 22 short films compiled by Gazan director Rashid Masharawi in the movie From Ground Zero, which made its official debut on January 3 and has been shortlisted for the Oscars’ Best International Film category, representing Palestine. The film has passed the preliminary round of voting and on January 17, its team will find out whether it made the final list of nominations. It is comprised of stories filmed by 22 directors in Gaza, from documentaries to fiction and animation, offering different viewpoints and experiences of the war that started on October 7, 2023 and has ended the lives of more than 45,500 people, according to numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry.

Al-Banna, who remembers the day of the bombing that took Natalie’s life as “a nightmare,” was a television and theater actor before the war began. He had a “flair for acting,” and was interested in the performing arts as a child; in 2015, after studying acting, he began filming his own productions. “I really like shooting love stories,” he confesses. “I’m quite romantic.” That’s partly why he wanted his one-man short film, entitled Jad and Natalie, to tell the story of himself and his fiancée. Producing it brought him out of the “period of deep depression” into which he entered after her death.

“I am one of the two million people who suffer in the Gaza Strip. The world needs to know that we have lives, families, love and dreams, like everyone else,” says Al-Banna. He refuses to leave because his “dream” of becoming an actor “hasn’t yet come true.” And he doesn’t want to fulfill it anywhere besides his home. When he arrived at Khan Yunis, convinced of the therapeutic powers of theater, he founded Child Smile, an organization that hosts theater workshops for children who have experienced war-related trauma. Its students use performing arts to tell their stories, transforming them into plays in order to express and work through their emotions. They eventually present the works to their parents and other children. “I do it because I need it as much as they do, to heal myself and help them to do the same,” he says.

Fighting back with “the peace of art”

Reema Mahmoud, 36, a filmmaker born in the West Bank who has lived for most of her life in Gaza, says that From Ground Zero “is not just a cinematographic project”. Her contribution to the film is her short Selfie, and she believes that film is “a way to fight with the peace of art” and to bring “to the Western and Arab world the image of what we experience every day: constant bombardment, total destruction and deprivation,” she explains from a refugee camp in Rafah, on the southern tip of the Strip.

In Selfie, which Mahmoud describes as “a message in a bottle” that she throws into the sea “for an unknown friend,” she tells of her experience being displaced by the war, condemned to live in refugee camps. It’s her story, but also that of thousands of other women. “We are especially vulnerable while being displaced: we have no privacy, not even basic sanitary supplies, clothes or food.” In the film, Mahmoud writes a letter in which she tells what the last year has been like for her, inserts it into a bottle and heaves it into the ocean. “I don’t know if it will get to anyone or not, but it’s my way of conveying my suffering.”

Mahmoud has been making movies for 15 years on the Strip, where she has produced 25 short films that focus on women’s experiences. Since childhood she has loved “classic films in black and white,” and though she studied communications and journalism at the University of Palestine in Gaza City, she was ultimately drawn to the seventh art. Her life has been marked by several conflicts, but none like the current war. “We live under constant bombardment, there is no safe place in Gaza. Our lives are always at risk,” she says. Still, she is certain that she wants to stay put: “It is the heart that beats in my body. My love for Gaza is similar to my love for my mother. I can’t live without them,” she says.

Our life is wasted between the need to document and the need to survive

Nidaa Abu Hasna, 30, recalls with a special fondness the first time she saw a film in a movie theater. It happened when she was 26 years old, in an Egyptian cinema on a three-day trip to visit a friend before starting her master’s in film studies in Tunisia. She had just graduated with a degree in radio and television from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City. She watched a comedy starring an actor that she wasn’t a huge fan of, but loved the experience. “I really liked buying the tickets and the popcorn,” she says, and recalls being surprised by the size of the theater and screen. “In Gaza, there’s nothing like that. I liked sharing the experience with other people and laughing. It was a fun day I’ll never forget,” she says from a refugee camp in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, via WhatsApp.

Abu Hasna is particularly interested in social and documentary film, “because it’s quite connected to reality.” As a cinematographic producer, she feels a responsibility to “document all the crimes that the [Israeli] occupation is committing” against Gazans. Her short film Beyond the Frame tells the story of an artist, her friend, whose exhibition installed in her father’s home was destroyed in the bombardment of a neighboring house.

Filming the short, she says, presented challenges “due to the magnitude of the destruction” and the effects it had on her friend. “Two years of work, destroyed right in front of her. She was devastated,” says Abu Hasna. That’s in addition to the horrors that she herself experienced during the film’s shooting. “Bombs and destruction all the time and everywhere,” which impacted her mental and emotional health. “I was in a very bad mental state, from which I’ve only recovered recently,” she says.

She didn’t plan to be in Gaza during this time, and much less in a refugee camp. She came on a visit in March 2023 and planned to return to Tunisia in November of the same year to begin her doctorate in audiovisual sciences and film, researching the disruptive narratives of Palestinian film. “I went to attend my sister’s wedding, I was preparing to get my driver’s license and for the first year of my doctorate,” she says. She could have fled the Strip during the first month of the war, but she didn’t want to leave her family and return to her studies in Tunisia “as if nothing was happening.” “I never imagined that it would go on for this long,” she says.

Although she has a gut feeling that she should stay to document what is happening in Gaza, she also hopes to return to her schooling in Tunisia as soon as possible because “Gaza is no longer a place where one can live.” She feels trapped in an unending paradox: she has to document, but at the same time, she can’t. “We live in the contradiction of having a deep need of documentation, and a deep need to save our lives and get out. Amid these paradoxes, our lives are being wasted.

Translated by Caitlin O’Donohue.

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There are only two animals capable of transporting an object so large that it can only be moved by cooperating: humans and ants. And not every species in the Formicidae family is capable of such a feat. Just 1% are able to work in teams to move a T-shaped object through two narrow doorways placed close together. The experiment is a standard of computer science and artificial intelligence, but a group of entomologists utilized it to compare the cognitive abilities of insects and people, both individually and in teams. Under equal conditions, ants perform better than us in collective intelligence.

The longhorn crazy ant (Paratrechina longicornis) is among the 1% of the Formicidae species who can use their strength and body to solve this kind of puzzle. They get their name from their erratic, seemingly insane movements — they rarely traverse in straight lines. But from those wild moves emerges a collective intelligence. As they do on an individual level, when in groups, the ants will sense, integrate and respond to their environment. Ofer Feinerman’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has studied them for years. Recently, its researchers designed a challenging experiment for the bugs in which they had to get a piece of wood in the shape of a “T” out of a room, through a small door which led to a second, narrower room leading to an even smaller door, finally ending up in a third room in the direction of their nest. To see who could accomplish the task more quickly between insects and humans, the team made five T’s of varying sizes and constructed a human-sized version of the same door-room sequence. They conducted a series of tests with single ants and people (using smaller T’s), then groups of six to nine, then large teams of up to 25 people and 80 ants.

Their results, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, demonstrate how the collective intelligence of ants takes hold, but also, how humans have trouble making decisions when they are in large groups. It’s obvious that involving more individuals allows a group to carry more weighty T’s. But the project also shows how the sum of individuals’ intelligence is not equal to that of the collective. The insects that tried to get out the small T’s failed many more times than when several got together, and large groups had even higher rates of success, thanks to a kind of emergent memory.

“An ant that carries a load on its own doesn’t remember the way it moved for very long: it changes constantly, especially if it hits a wall,” Feinerman, the study’s lead author, says in an email. “The group of ants can remember the direction in which they were headed for a few seconds ago and persist in walking in that direction, even if an edge of the load they are carrying hits a wall,” adds the entomologist. This fits into what they call emergent intelligence, “a memory that the group of ants has, but the individual ant does not.” The crazy ants’ ability may have an evolutionary basis. “This is a species of ants that tend to give up at the slightest conflict. In this context, this means that, if a neighboring colony of another species also arrives looking for food, they will chase the crazy ants away,” Feinerman explains. The only chance the crazy ants have of getting food is to cooperate to get it to their nest as quickly as possible. “Therefore, they become amazing problem-solvers when it comes to transporting large loads in complex environments,” says the Israeli scientist.

The comparison between these special ants and humans led to various results. On an individual level, ant versus human, man always bested the bug. In groups, both small and large, the homo sapiens were more efficient than the ants at moving the T. But there was one variation of the experiment in which ants beat humans: during the large group test in which they were not permitted to speak or make gestures. To make sure they followed directions, researchers made subjects wear masks and very dark sunglasses in an attempt to equalize the communication capacity of the two species. The edges of the T carried by humans were equipped with force sensors in order to measure the intensity and direction of the participants’ movements. This was the only way they had to communicate their intentions. The result was that, in the majority of the groups’ attempts, the ants were more efficient.

“People in a non-communicative group (i.e., with a communication scheme similar to that of ants) start to behave a bit more like them and, in so doing, their performance levels decrease,” says Feinerman. The experiment has led to a better understanding of the cognitive abilities of the crazy ants as a group, but also those of humans. “An individual person and an individual ant are, of course, very different. The person transforms the maze in his mind into a graph, which is an extreme dimensional reduction. Instead of exploring the whole complex maze, only a handful of nodes are explored,” says the entomologist. He adds, “To solve the puzzle, people need to try to figure out which node is connected to which other nodes and slowly discover the links between unconnected nodes until they find their way through the maze.”

When people discover a link between nodes, they use long-term memory to remember that action and not repeat it later. A single ant is very different. Unable to reproduce the puzzle in its brain, it lifts the load and tries to move it in all directions. Feinerman recalls that in this, they surpass most other species, which will commonly pick up the T and pull it toward the nest using the straightest and shortest path, even if the object cannot fit, without ever trying anything different. But when many ants get together, “they acquire some human-like characteristics,” says the entomologist.

In their conclusions, the authors share two primary findings. “Our results exemplify how simple minds can easily take advantage of scalability, while more complex minds need ample communication to cooperate efficiently.”

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