If you found yourself passing through the elegant and then brand new first-floor passageways of the NBC Tower on Columbus Drive in the early 1990s, you’d often encounter a long line of jabbering, amped-up folks who were about to attend a taping of one of two nationally syndicated talk shows: “The Jenny Jones Show” or “Jerry Springer.”
The former program ran for 12 seasons, as the comedian/actress Jenny Jones segued from a relatively traditional talk-show format into a lurid, tabloid format. As for Jerry Springer—he took a similar path but elevated (or more accurately, sank) it to a whole other level, eschewing a milquetoast format for tawdry themes, raucous crowd participation and on-set fights, in the process becoming a huge TV star for all the wrong reasons. (And Springer would be the first to tell you that, not that his self-awareness mitigated the odious stream of garbage flowing from his show for some 27 years and nearly 4,000 episodes.)
