Americans, please help me settle an 8-year-old dispute with my husband. Are the guests on Jerry Springer real people or actors?
N insists they are actors because identical Russian shows only ever have actors posing as regular people on them + “no regular person can be this way.”
And I insist that it makes no sense to compare Americans to Russians because Russians have a much higher self-censorship because of how fake and hypocritical Russian-speaking cultures are (and please note that I said “cultures”, plural. I’m obviously including my Russian-speaking subgroup with its obnoxious “let’s keep up appearances above all” strategy.)
We’ve been at it for 8 years even though we don’t watch the show. There is obviously something much greater than TV at stake here.
Clarissa's Blog 
They’re real. Many Americans are fame hungry and will do anything to end up on television, no matter how mortifying.
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Right? That’s what I keep saying to him! Eight years but he doesn’t believe me. So I thought that if I collect enough testimonies on this blog saying they are real, maybe then we will finally put this to rest.
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Even my own mother is like that. We were walking together and a man started flirting with her while there was a camera behind him, and she got star-struck and hammed it up for the camera. But I was suspicious and asked them why there were filming, and that’s the beginning of The Story of How I Kept Me and my Mother from Being Unwitting Extras in a Pick Up Artist Instructional Video. I lost my temper and screamed at them that I’d sue their pants off if they used footage of us. My mom thought I was overreacting and upset that I ruined her 15 minutes of fame, of course.
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“and that’s the beginning of The Story of How I Kept Me and my Mother from Being Unwitting Extras in a Pick Up Artist Instructional Video. I lost my temper and screamed at them that I’d sue their pants off if they used footage of us.”
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A long time ago I read an article in the Utnre reader on mutliple talk show participants (just after the talk show boom of the early 90s petered out).
The main concern of the article was people putting themselves into vulnerable positions and then not getting the follow up help they needed.
Anyhoo, one participant who had been a professional wrestler compared the two saying in effect (roughly) “you only get hurt if you forget that it’s wrestling”.
My takeaway from that and other things is that it’s about 50/50. They’re real people playing stylized versions of themselves (and exploiting their real traumas) to get on TV. The more you try to figure out which parts are real and which are fake the more confused you’ll get.
What I noticed when I finally saw some JS episodes:
a. Boy those accents are just like where I’m from
b. the emotional turmoil while filming seems real enough often enough, how much that effects what goes on afterwards is anyone’s guess.
Probably not helpful….
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Yes, I agree completely that the guests fall into a pattern of how the show expects them to behave. But that’s still not nearly the same as being professional actors, right? I mean, the show has been going on for ages, how many professional actors are there in this country?
N says that he’s see several articles in Russia that argue the show only casts actors and that this is a limited cast of actors, resulting in guests that look very similar.
So as you can see, this is an important issue for Russians. It arouses a lot of passion.
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Yes, real, but I think some of the most salacious details and drama are exaggerated.
That said, they remind me of people I actually grew up with in North Florida. Definitely not actors.
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“That said, they remind me of people I actually grew up with in North Florida.”
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And some I knew further south (which in florida actually means ‘just a little less dysfunctional’). As I like to say, Cracker Florida – it’s a hell of a place….
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They are real like people who appear on reality shows are real. Their real life situations are manipulated and massaged to heighten the drama.
Jerry Springer is proto-reality tv.
Believe it or not, Jerry Springer used to the be mayor of Cincinnati and a political advisor to Robert Kennedy.
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It’s obvious that Springer is very intelligent. I have no idea why he chose to be on this particular show for so long. But it works because the contrast between his fuddy-daddy professorial persona offers a great contrast to the guests.
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Here’s a story on his political career. It’s been years since I heard it but I remember it as pretty amazing at the time.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/258/leaving-the-fold?act=1#play
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An episode of the same show featured a family that makes a career out of being on on shows like Jerry Springer. I was searching for it last night, but couldn’t find it.
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No they’re actors! They get a script and have lines to say. My friend heard some actors practicing on a plane once – maybe she made it up but I doubt it.
They aren’t professional actors, their names are real though. So I guess it’s somewhere in between – that’s how most reality shows are.
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Jerry Springer is smart and has achieved a net worth of around $75 million according to one source. So tell me, what other job allows you to work those hours and make that much?
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