But I don’t think Mr. Springer’s defense of his show as simply a mirror rings true. He wasn’t showing Americans as they are. He was showing Americans as they quickly learned to portray themselves to be, to an eager audience that wanted to see people at their most base. He was showing us racist kids and horny teenagers, all carefully selected by a team of producers aiming for high ratings and lots of controversy. Mr. Springer wasn’t a ringmaster; he was a tutor, and he was teaching his guests how to be exactly what his audience clamored to see.

Back then, the audience could enjoy, or shudder in horror at, the spectacle of their fellow Americans behaving badly from the safe remove of a television screen — just as the audience can now watch a similar spectacle on reality TV. But the social media era has smashed that barrier between performative awfulness and its audience. Mr. Springer’s more insidious legacy is that we’ve all been lured through the glass and, just like his guests, we’ve all been egged on to perform our cruelest, worst, most vice-signaling behavior, all while gawking at the same behavior in others. With “The Jerry Springer Show,” we were still just the audience. Now, we’re both the audience and the guests.

Mr. Springer might say he didn’t want this legacy. He was the child of German Jewish Holocaust survivors who emigrated from London to the United States with him when he was 5. He once claimed that he wanted his television show to be serious, with serious interviews with serious people. But the ratings seemed to soar when the guests on his show spent less time debating the Iran-contra scandal and more time debating whether women with large breasts were more attractive than women with small breasts.

Mr. Springer oversaw it all and tried to convince us that it was normal. Or, more accurately, that we were normal. We weren’t freaks, not like his cavalcade of guests. And in that way, he followed in a long tradition. The freak shows of the 19th and early 20th century didn’t depict bearded women and little people as neighbors, friends, churchgoers and classmates, but as a separate species (sometimes literally), totally apart from normal people who might attend the show for titillation.

Mr. Springer’s genius was in knowing that dynamic still operated — that given the promise of potential fame, opportunity or notoriety, some people were still more than willing to perform in the freak show themselves. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, that meant other people turned on their TV at 11 a.m. to watch their fellow citizens perform their seemingly sexually charged, violent and sometimes very stupid lives for their entertainment, then turned it off and walked away.