Posted by chicagomedia.org on May 19, 2009 at 09:59:17:
Jerry Springer wraps up his tenure in Chicago before leaving for Connecticut
We hardly knew you. As the talk show host exits Chicago, it feels as if he was never really here
Steve Johnson | Tribune Internet critic
May 19, 2009
And so we bid the man goodbye.
No, not "goodbye." We bid him adieu, because for Jerry Springer, a high-toned parting word might help.
Ciao, Jerry. A bientot. Don't let the chair flying toward the door hit you on the way out.
Springer is leaving Chicago. His final shows at the NBC Tower tape Tuesday: another panel of University of Chicago economists smoking pipes and discussing the trade deficit. Daniel Barenboim may show up to play a piano concerto. Check your listings.
And after the last notes ring -- if, indeed, those high-pitched sounds coming from his studio are musical notes -- our city will have a void, of sorts.
No more chants of "Jair-ree, Jair-ree" echoing toward the lakeshore. No more than the normal quotient of romantically confused and hyperbolically angry young people roaming the streets. No low-culture, crosstown counterweight to Oprah, with her precious gift giveaways and proper suburban-mom audience.
Nobody got their hair done before going to a "Jerry Springer Show" taping. Hell, nobody combed their hair.
Nobody expected to receive a Chevy or to see Chevy Chase. A bloody nose or a roiling marital breakup, that was the "Jerry" show expectation. Tank tops. Mullets. Somebody running at somebody else who had once been close to them, fingers grabbing for hair, lips forming vile oaths learned, in part, from previous "Springer" shows.
A staffer working the "bleep" button like pinball flippers.
Springer leaves us as the mayor of mayhem, but at peace with his place.
"Over time, people have, I guess, figured out that it's a television show, it's not me," he says. "And all of a sudden they're able to see me as a regular person and not just the role I play on a crazy show."
His 17-year tenure here ends not with a cancellation or a retirement for the 65-year-old host, nor with a guest having gone a little too wild. It ends with a corporate-level consolidation and some good old-fashioned bribery coming from a municipality that is not Chicago.
Beating us at our game is Connecticut, dangling millions of dollars in tax breaks, but not a red carpet. His new studio is near a Stamford church, and the pastor and parishioners there are none too happy about the neighbors. Daytime talk show guests just aren't their kind of lost souls.
It didn't have to be that way for Springer. No human being starts out thinking he'd like his name to become a stand-in for lowest-common-denominator behavior.
But the relatively high-toned show he began with didn't rivet people to their sofas, and Springer liked staying on the air a little too much. After a couple of years, he changed tacks. The new, high-human-tension show rocketed in popularity. The old him remained in an end-of-show "final thought," several tuts about the onstage trauma his producers had orchestrated.
For a time in the late 1990s, "Springer" challenged "Oprah" for the daytime ratings lead. There were outrage and adulation in the land. He has consistently rejected the outrage part as "elitism."
"Why is it so outrageous that people who aren't famous talk about their private lives?" he asks. "It's like, 'It's OK if good-looking people talk about who they slept with, but, please, if you are ugly, we don't want to hear about it'?"
"Springer" now is reliable and almost tolerated, like uncomfortable old furniture. Tune in and feel better about your friends and family, worse about your society. Tune in and be surprised that Jerry is still on.
He has translated his arms-length stance toward his own show into pop culture icon status. He guested on one network variety show, "Dancing With the Stars," and hosted another, "America's Got Talent." They wrote an opera about him, "Jerry Springer -- The Opera," and it was well received. He has been traveling to New York, rehearsing for a stage role in London, where he'll play the Richard Gere role in the musical "Chicago."
He probably got the role because of his association with our city. Yet in the interview, he can't muster up more than generalities about the city, and we, truth be told, rarely remembered his Chicago connections.
He was never top-of-the-tongue for lists of local celebrities; he maintained principal residence in Florida; and the show rarely came to mind when you thought of national-stage things made here.
Maybe we thought of him after an out-of-town visitor learned that tickets for "Oprah" were an impossibility. Maybe we remembered Springer when we saw a stretch limo pull up outside NBC Tower and unpack people who probably hadn't sat that far from their driver since prom night.
We definitely remembered when the NBC station, WMAQ-Ch. 5, tried to put Springer on its newscasts as a commentator. Anchors Carol Marin and Ron Magers quickly left for other assignments.
But that was more than a decade ago. Since then, he never managed to feel like more than a carpetbagger here, among us but not of us.
Now he will use another town's airport and TV facilities, dressed up to look like nowhere in particular.
Final thought: Jerry Springer is leaving. It might have been sentimental. It should be a relief. It feels more like trivia.