Hollywood & Crime: Murder on The Jenny Jones Show

I’ve been thinking a lot about daytime talk shows recently. It’s not as major a phenomenon in the UK as it is in America, especially in the 1990s, where the fight for syndication domination generated billions of dollars. But it was a fascination of mine at a young age. Various channels would show the US shows, like Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, and Ricki Lake, and my sister and I would watch slack-jawed as the guests tore off one another’s wigs and had every third word bleeped. We didn’t typically have stuff like this in Britain, but you could see their influence bleeding into our cultural consciousness (hello, Jeremy Kyle.) It may have been my first exposure to the concept of exploitation as entertainment. Writing about Oprah and the wagon of fat had me revisiting some of those more notorious episodes, and one particular incident where the fight for ratings led to a murder.

In the 1980s, the tabloid talk show ruled the roost. Both daytime and primetime slots were dominated by this aggressive style of programming, where controversial guests and hot-button social issues would be reduced to confrontations and what we’d now think of as viral moments. CBS turned its coverage of the 1968 Presidential election into a pundit war between William Buckley and Gore Vidal, and reinvented political TV in the process.

(Live footage of Gore Vidal in the ‘60s.)

Daytime TV didn’t start out like this. Tabloid shows often tried to bring serious topics to the forefront, focusing on things that the predominantly female audience cared about. Yale University sociology professor Joshua Gamson argued that the tabloid talk show did a lot of good for increasing the public visibility of LGBTQ+ people, although it was often contextualized as something to be shocked or repulsed by.

The Phil Donahue Show, which was the dominant series in this format for decades, had space for serious conversations but wasn’t above some shock tactics. By the ‘90s, even his series was as trashy as his descendants. So was Oprah before she fully became Oprah. Seriously, some of her early stuff is seedy as hell. But of course, it got worse. Jerry Springer’s series was an endless cavalcade of raunch and fist fights. Geraldo Rivera ended up with a broken nose after some white supremacists got into a brawl on his show. Ricki Lake had the Westboro Baptist Church on her show, although she clearly regretted the choice almost instantly and had them removed from the studio. Montel Williams hosted psychic readings, including one incident where someone claimed to a couple that their missing son was dead (he wasn’t.)

(Image via IMDb.)

This was the birth of “trash TV.” Some of these hosts were okay with that label. Jenny Jones was not.