The iconic and notorious fights that “The Jerry Springer Show” saw weren’t an accident.
Investigation Discovery’s series “Hollywood Demons” is dropping its second season, which will focus on “The Jerry Springer Show,” featuring interviews with the talk show’s creator, Burt Dubrow and producers Brad Khulman and Reena Friedman Watts, as well as one of Springer’s last recorded interviews.
A clip from the episode, via Entertainment Weekly, has the show’s associate producer, Houston Curtis, revealing how they provoked the show’s guests to fight on stage.
“I noticed pretty quick what the secret was,” Curtis says in the clip. “Here’s how we got them to fight in the beginning of ‘Springer,’ post [KKK] fight.”
Here, the producer is referring to the 1997 episode of the show, where Springer was moderating a conversation about race and religion between members of the Ky Klux Klan and the Jewish Defense League that ended in a full on brawl.
“Let’s say that I have two brothers in a conflict. When you’re prepping the guests, you tell one of them, ‘If your brother says something you don’t like, you can yell at them, you can get up in his face, you can even spit on him. But whatever you do, don’t hit him.’ And you don’t tell the other person any of that,” Curtis says in the clip.
“Once you produce one person to get up and spit in someone’s face, and then you don’t give any instruction to the other one, the other one is going to haul off and knock the hell out of the one who did it, and boom. You got a fight,” he adds.
“The Jerry Springer Show” ran from 1991 to 2018. The show began as a typical run-of-the-mill daytime talk show discussing current events and political issues, until it evolved into a tabloid talk show, with brawls, exposés, and extremely controversial topics ranging from abuse to incest.
Springer died from pancreatic cancer in 2023 at 79-years-old.
This season, “Hollywood Demons” will also feature episodes on child stars whose careers turned into being adult entertainers, “Saved By the Bell,” some doctors involved in celebrity overdoses, and the scandals of “16 and Pregnant.”
“Hollywood Demons” season 2 premieres April 20 at 9 p.m. ET on ID and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
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