The Jerry Springer Show pushed the limits of TV — and also a lot of producers’ personal values.
Producer Toby Yoshimura recalls feeling “the pressure of that show” in the new two-part documentary looking back at the talk show, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, now streaming on Netflix.
“I wasn’t doing well. Emotionally, the pressure of that show was kicking my ass. I mean, stuff starts to grate at you, of stuff you ask people to do in the name of entertainment,” he shared.
“But at the end of the day, my pressure was to please Richard. That was it.”
Yoshimura explained that executive producer Richard Dominick became a father figure to him. But seeing his boss as both a patriarch and the person his job hinged on was stressful for the producer, ultimately leading him down a dark path.
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“The only way I could deal with it was I was s–t-faced hammered for four days. Then I’d sober up and do my show and crawl back into a bottle,” he admitted. “Then tequila stopped working. Cocaine was right on the heels of it.”
Ultimately, Yoshimura experienced the last straw when he answered a call from a viewer looking to be a guest on the show. Her story haunted him.
“I remember one night a woman called the show because she wanted to call her dad to stop ordering her at the website that she’s a hooker on cause they’d send her and she’d have to do the job. This had been going on since she was 16, right?” he recalled.
“I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna get this f—king story, the dad’s not gonna come, right?’ And he came. And I was dumbfounded.”
As part of his job, Yoshimura went to check on both parties the next day. “We had them under aliases in different hotels and they didn’t know where each other were and I went over to her hotel first just to see how she was doing.”
“And I knocked on the door and her dad opened the door in a towel. And she came to the door. You can tell she was embarrassed. They’d just got done having sex. It was like putting two barrels of a shotgun to my head and pulling the f—king trigger,” he said.
“That’s something that I don’t feel I need to contribute to. And that was the f—king end for me. I quit the show.”
The decision to quit wasn’t an easy one, despite Yoshimura knowing he’d reached his limit.
“I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t even tell Richard. I literally packed my s— into a truck and I was a no-show. I wasn’t responding or anything. I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was Richard.”
Yoshimura continued, “He said, ‘You’re not coming back, are you?’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘I understand. Take care of yourself.’ And I couldn’t stop crying. I was broken.”
While it was a turning in his time there, it wasn’t the end: Yoshimura returned to the show in 2006 before leaving for good in 2008.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is now streaming on Netflix.
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
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