It was a knock on a hotel door that made TV producer Toby Yoshimura realise that his time was up on the infamous Jerry Springer show.
He had booked a guest who was a sex worker whose father had been paying her for sex since she was 16, and she wanted to ask him why he did it.
The show had put her and her father in different hotels under aliases, but when Toby went to meet her and knocked on her hotel door, her dad answered in just a towel.
‘You could tell she was embarrassed. They’d just been having sex. It was like someone putting a shotgun to my head and pulling the trigger,’ Toby tells Metro over Zoom. ‘That was something I don’t think I need to contribute to – that was the f***ing end for me. I quit the show.’
With titles like ‘I married a horse’ and ‘I cut off my manhood’, it was hard to see Jerry Springer as reality TV. The guests were so extreme, the love triangles so outrageous, and the on-set behaviour so appalling, it didn’t seem that these stories could be genuine.
But truth is stranger than fiction, as Toby discovered over the years – and that’s why people loved the Jerry Springer Show.
The talk show, which first aired in 1991, was an experience unlike any ever seen on TV. A parade of small-town Americans with fetishes, addictions and complicated personal lives were invited to the Chicago studio to air their dirty laundry while an audience watched on, chipping in over the microphone or cheering and jeering as rows inevitably ended in a physical fight, and burly security men watched from the side of the stage.
It was the inception of American shock culture, the granddaddy of reality TV as we know it and it drew adoration and condemnation in equal measure.
Tabloid writer Richard Dominick, the executive producer credited with giving the show its ‘wild and sexy’ nature, issued an edict to producers: ‘Do not bring anything to me that is not interesting with the sound off.’ With the show airing in the early hours, he wanted people flicking through the channels to stop at Jerry and watch.
They were drawn in by naked bodies, fighting, grown men in diapers…. all with dramatic titles on the bottom of the screen: ‘Stripper wars’, ‘I’m pregnant by my brother’ and ‘Threesome with my mom’.
As the show knocked Oprah talk show off the top spot, it pushed further boundaries; and when the Ku Klux Klan were invited on to do battle with the audience over their hateful racist views in 1997, questions were asked about whether Jerry had gone too far.
‘In a free society, the media should reflect all elements of that society, not just the mainstream. On our show, for example, we have Klansmen on, we have Neo Nazis. They killed my family. I hate these people. I hate what they stand for. But in America, I may hate what you say, but I’ll fight to the death your right to say it,’ Jerry Springer, a former mayor, newsreader and children of Jewish refugees, told an interview at the time.
The show’s rise to infamy is now being told in a new two-part Netflix special Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, out today.
Speaking about his own experience, Toby tells Metro: ‘We felt like we were the pariahs of television. Everybody told us “You’re just producing trash.” Even my family hated it.’
His father, Akira Yoshimura, was a production designer for the iconic comedy show Saturday Night Live, and the pair even lost contact over Toby’s involvement. ‘One Christmas my Dad said: “What you do isn’t television. I can still see his face. It was of disgust. I didn’t talk to him for four years.’
Instead, Richard became Toby’s de facto dad and, eager to please, he employed tactics to ensure he provided explosive television.
‘I would throw the door open to the dressing room and pick up a chair and throw it across the green room and start screaming at guests. “Do you care about your sister’s feelings? No! You’re goddamn right you don’t.”
‘You had to reach into their brain and tap on the thing that would make them laugh, cry, scream or fight. You’re starting a s*** fight. You rev ‘em up to tornado level and send them out on stage… It’s called shaping the missile and it’s the dark side,’ he tells the documentary.
It worked. Teeth were knocked out, people lost chunks of scalp. On one occasion, Toby remembers a female guest being taken to hospital to have her fingers surgically repaired after her acrylic was torn off, taking her real fingernail with it.
His whole life revolved around the show, says Toby. ‘None of the producers wanted to disappoint Richard. Having his approval was the world,’ he tells Metro.
‘Working conditions were terrible,’ he adds. ‘We wouldn’t ever leave our desk. We put these terrible pressures on ourselves and it got worse when the media started coming after us. Preachers on the street were protesting outside of the building. The City Council were trying to shut us down.’
It was a pressure cooker. Toby would work seven days a week, coming in late and then staying in the studio until the early hours, sometimes falling asleep under his desk at five am.
And it was a traumatic experience for many of the interviewees. One guest, known only as Melanie, flew to Chicago to appear on one of the many popular love triangle episodes.
She tells the documentary: ‘We arrived in Chicago, and from the second they picked us up from the airport, they did everything in their power to get us as crazy as possible. They gave us so many drink tickets. They were like: “Go hog wild, have fun.” And so we got wasted, and then we got to the hotel. We kind of kept the party going. We probably stayed up till four in the morning, maybe slept for an hour.
‘They woke our asses out of bed at like, 5am and I remember being in the elevator on the way down, and somebody else from one of the other shows was just like, “Yeah, I was up all night doing speed”. I probably got to the green room at like, six o’clock in the morning or something and the producers were there from the get go, just kind of like coaching us on what to say and how to act.’
Before she went on stage, Melanie’s heart was pounding, she was tired, ‘crazy and ready to f***it up’ when she was told her boyfriend was sleeping with someone else. She lost it at him and had to be restrained by security.
‘They weren’t treating you sensitively. They weren’t interested in what kind of impact it was gonna have on you. It was all for the show’, she remembers.
However, in July 2000 things got darker than anyone could have imagined. Guest Nancy Campbell-Panitz was murdered by her ex-husband Ralf Panitz two months after she was humiliated on stage as part of another love triangle storyline.
‘Nan’ as she was known, appeared on the show because she believed she was being reunited with her estranged husband. She was confronted on stage by Ralf’s new wife, Eleanor, who told her “Ralf loves me, he wants to be with me, and you redheaded bitch from Hell, you need to leave us alone. You need to get a life”.
Two months later, after a court hearing in which a restraining order from Nan was issued against Ralf, he sat in a bar when the show aired. He watched the entire thing before travelling to her Florida home and beating her to death.
Ralf was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2002. After sending him down, the judge said of the show: ‘Ralf Panitz, Eleanor Panitz and Nancy Campbell were brought to Chicago by the Jerry Springer Show, then manipulated by producers of that show. Are ratings more important than the dignity of human life? Shame on you.’
According to TV Critic Robert Feder it was this episode that exposed just how dangerous things had become on the show. ‘These were real human beings with real emotional issues. People who were so mentally unstable that they could commit murder over these issues,’ he tells the documentary. ‘To hold those up as entertainment, as sport, that is about as dark as it could possibly get.’
Jerry Springer denied any responsibility over the murder, while Toby, who was not involved with the Panitz show, began to unravel.
‘I wasn’t doing well emotionally. The pressure of that show… stuff starts degrading you, the things that you ask people to do in the name of entertainment. My pressure was to please Richard and that was it,’ he remembers.
‘The only way I could deal with it was getting s***-faced hammered. Then I would sober up, do my show and then pump my body full of tequila again. And then tequila stops working and cocaine is on the heels of it.’
Toby says that following the father and daughter hotel incident, he ‘sat in a room in Los Angeles for a week and couldn’t get off the floor.’
He remembers: ‘I was crying for five days. I was really disappointed in myself and I was letting Richard Dominick down, the guy meant the world to me.’ Although Toby left the show in 2004, he returned in 2006 following a call from Richard – however he finally quit for good in 2008.
Meanwhile, following Nan’s murder, network lawyers cracked down and the content of the show changed – there was less nudity, less outrage and safer subject matter. Dominick then also left in 2008, ratings fell and the show, named the Worst Show of All Time by TV Guide, was cancelled in 2018, when Jerry was worth an estimated $60 million. He died in 2023 of pancreatic cancer aged 79.
Toby, 48, still works in television, now in finance and strategy, and refuses to accept that the people who came on the show were exploited.
‘The guests that came on the show wanted to be there. They called us wanting to be on the show,’ he insists. ‘This was a job I had 25 years ago. It’s really my rear view mirror. It’s something I did. I am not ashamed of it. I’m not gonna apologise for it.’
However, Toby admits the incident with the woman in the hotel room altered his perception of the show and acted as a turning point.
‘I was convinced that this story was about this woman telling her father to stop ordering her as a prostitute, and I was wrong. They didn’t care, and that blew my mind,’ he explains.
I’m proud of the work I did there. I worked hard. There’s some really tragic moments on that show and I’ve forgiven myself for all of the trauma that I’ve inflicted.
‘But if you want to love or hate the show, I would much rather you hate it, because hate lasts longer.’
You can stream Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera Action on Netflix now.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Claie.Wilson@metro.co.uk
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