In the late 90s, Springer’s talkshow dominated the ratings with some of the most controversial stories ever told. It certainly wasn’t easy to make – but what do its producers think of it now?

Is there anything The Jerry Springer Show wouldn’t do? The shock talkshow, an arena for people in love triangles to come to blows, also featured incest, white supremacists and a man who married his horse. “I did pitch a guy having an affair,” says Tobias Yoshimura, one of the show’s producers. “He was a necrophiliac. That one got shot down pretty quickly.” Perhaps not so much for matters of taste, as for the practicalities of television and any hopes of a good fight scene. The third guest – the shock reveal of the affair partner – says Yoshimura with a wry smile, “would have to be a cadaver. So that was the step too far.”

The Jerry Springer Show, which ran from 1991 before finally fizzling out in 2018, started as a mundane daytime talkshow, fronted by Springer, a mild-mannered news anchor and former mayor of Cincinnati. Threatened with cancellation because of its terrible ratings, its new executive producer, Richard Dominick, took it in a sensationalist direction. It became a phenomenon and at its height in the late 90s, its ratings were bigger than Oprah Winfrey’s. Morality campaigners held protests outside the studios; many others claimed it had corroded American society. Take it further and you could argue that it is (partly) responsible for everything from the worst of reality TV to the way people behave on social media and even the rise of Donald Trump. “He took my show and brought it to the White House,” Springer said in 2019.

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US star had alleged British TV producer sexually assaulted her when she was judge on talent shows

Paula Abdul has settled a lawsuit with the American Idol producer Nigel Lythgoe after alleging that he sexually assaulted her while she was a judge on the programme.

The US singer and TV star, 62, filed a notice of settlement of the case in Los Angeles superior court on Thursday, which is yet to be approved by a judge.

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The Oscar-tipped drama follows the ABC crew of journalists who had to cover the unfolding violence as terrorism overtook the the Munich Olympics in 1972

Geoffrey Mason had begun the day expecting to oversee TV coverage of sports such as boxing, swimming and volleyball. Hours later, he found himself staring at German machine guns and being ordered to turn the cameras off.

The story of how Mason’s control room responded to the hostage siege at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich is told in September 5 , a thriller starring John Magaro and Peter Sarsgaard and directed by Tim Fehlbaum. The film follows the ABC Sports team as they turn their cameras on the news – the first time a terrorist attack would be broadcast live to a global audience.

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The long-running topical comedy show made its way stateside in September and it’s turned out to be a far different proposition than the original

“Big up Keir Starmer,” declared a British prisoner released early from jail last month. “Well, he said more than that,” joked Charlie Brooker, that week’s guest host on Have I Got News for You. “But his sentence got cut short.”

Cue muffled laughter, and groans. “Very good,” lied Ian Hislop, a veteran team captain on the long-running UK comedy panel show. When a moth was spotted flying around the studio, Paul Merton, the other captain, quipped: “I think it’s jumped out of the script.”

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Colin Farrell’s show-stopping turn, and a scene-stealing Cristin Milioti, make this DC crime series an unlikely winner

HBO’s DC show The Penguin is one of those rare treats that comes along almost completely unexpectedly, like Batman cracking a smile, or Harley Quinn making sensible life choices. Nobody really expected a show about the second banana in the dark knight’s famed rogue’s gallery to be up to much even if Colin Farrell’s performance, under all those prosthetics, in The Batman was a startlingly grimy diversion from the gloomy glamour of Matt Reeves’s elegant vision of Gotham City’s proto dark knight. But an entire series based on Oswald Cobb’s bloody rise through the ranks of Gotham City’s lurid underworld always seemed a little superfluous to the main event, a spiky little sideshow to keep us entertained, deep down in the gutter with a villainous Humpty Dumpty, while DC works out what to do with the highfalutin’ sequel.

Past the season’s midway point, and it’s clear it’s more than just filler, and could yet be DC’s most unexpected hit since Aquaman turned murmuring sweet nothings to swordfish into a billion-dollar box office splash . Farrell, who at times looks like Danny DeVito on a diet of gas station sushi and sheer spite, is clearly having so much fun as the Penguin that it might even make up for having to sit for three hours to undergo his daily transformation. This was supposed to be a novelty, the chance to see the Oscar nominee literally disappear into the role of Gotham’s most likable dirty little rat, but the twists, turns and power struggles are so fast and fabulous that spending each episode trying to spot the handsome Irishman underneath all that silicone would be like attending a Vegas magic show just to figure out how the rabbit got in the hat.

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FBI pioneer Ann Burgess developed groundbreaking ways to examine and investigate those with a compulsion to kill, the focus of a fascinating new docuseries

Dr Ann Burgess looked out at an audience of 40 FBI members – all of them men – and started talking about rape. “The one question they would always say to me: ‘Were you raped?’” Burgess recalls in the new documentary Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer . “They thought rape was just sex: women secretly wanted it or they were out there and asked for it.”

The three-part series, executive produced by Dakota and Elle Fanning , traces the life and career of Burgess, a pioneer in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit who helped develop the agency’s modern playbook for profiling serial killers.

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Despite the success of Barbenheimer, the industry faces strikes, AI concerns and an untenable situation for those not at the top

It was a pink mushroom cloud that even enveloped the White House. “Did you see Barbie or Oppenheimer this weekend?” a reporter asked the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. She replied: “I knew I was going to get that question. I did not. But heard that it did very well.”

Both films did very well : Barbie collected $162m in ticket sales while Oppenheimer, about the father of the atom bomb, earned $82.4m. It was comfortably the best weekend at the domestic box office since the coronavirus pandemic. But when future historians come to study the “ Barbenheimer ” phenomenon, they may still have a question: was this the dawn of a Hollywood renaissance or glorious last stand of an industry in decline?

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Michelle Buteau graduates from sterling support to impressive lead in a series about a woman finding her way after a messy breakup

Survival of the Thickest, a new romantic comedy series starring comedian Michelle Buteau, is a joyful way to get acquainted with Buteau’s star power.

After a cascading list of supporting roles, Buteau emerges triumphant as a leading lady, providing a hilarious and empathetic look at one woman’s attempt at coming into her own after a messy breakup. Mavis Beaumont (Buteau) is a 38-year-old, struggling, plus-size stylist, hoping to climb the shaky rungs of the fashion world alongside her co-worker and boyfriend of five years, Jacque (Taylor Sele).

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The Deadpool star’s love of Wales continues with a weekly selection of imported TV programming available to US viewers

You’ll chwerthin. You’ll crio. You’ll crynu.

So declares a trailer for Welsh Wednesdays, the six-hour block of Welsh television programming that the actor and recent Cambrophile Ryan Reynolds has brought to his new US entertainment channel Maximum Effort. In keeping with Reynolds’s goofy sensibility, most of Maximum Effort’s shows are nostalgic American TV comedies. But the hump-day special showcase promises a weekly infusion of exotic entertainment unlike anything on the usual suspect streaming platforms.

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