Toby Fails to Deliver the Trash

Toby Fails to Deliver the Trash by Roxanne McDonald

The goal is a good old-fashioned white trash Springer show. But returning producer Toby, despite bringing on a hillbilly, his favored pig, and his jealous shaman girlfriend, disappoints.

“It’s gotta be a home-run show, or I’m gonna get my ass canned,” frets Jerry Springer producer. So he drives to the deepest parts of Kentucky, retrieves Harley the hillbilly, Harley’s spoiled pet pig (who lives in the house and eats first before any human), and the jealous girlfriend.

The neighbors point out how obviously trashy these folks are, what with the crap on the porch and the clutter in the yard…and the fact that there’s obviously a pig living inside the house.

Producer’s assistant Gabe and producer Toby enter to find Harley feeding the pig and saying it gets to eat first and to

see a disgusted girlfriend in the corner, preparing to leap out and do some down-home voodoo on them.
Through torrential rains and on a restrictive schedule, one which has not included Toby even getting to the writing of the intros for Jerry, Toby stresses. And Gabe does all he can not to gag.

No sleep, no time, Toby rails on the script, then coaches the guests, who he says are (or aren’t?) scared enough and need to be snapped out of it.

He does this boot camp style lecturing, but dums it down and adds the quintessential potty mouth that the guests are more accustomed to and will therefore launch into, hopefully, themselves: “I’ll stomp the sh-t out of you myself…. I’m stone-cold fu—ing serious,” he growls.

After a discouraging doubtful Rachelle warns Toby the show had better be good and she had better care and not be bored, Toby returns to the featured trashites and trashettes, and does the role-playing and coaching that will get them emotionally invested and ready to rumble.

But the girl who is supposed to be a respectable mother being cuckolded isn’t respectable (instead tears off her clothes and does some odd rubbing against the security guys); the speed freak who is supposed to cry doesn’t (or can’t, uh, being wired); and pissed-off hillbilly woman is not all that dramatic about having her bedside usurped by a pig (and is instead doing some toothless shamanic thing at the front row audience members).
It was supposed to be weird and funny and goofy and it wasn’t. And Toby admits this, and takes the lectures and shaming from executive producer Richard that should have been the lectures and shaming the guests woof on each other.

Because it was a “horrendously boring” show, and though Richard has brought back Toby because 1) he wanted the curveball show Toby had always been able to do in the past and 2) he has an oddball fondness for Toby, Richard has to express disappointment and has to tell Toby to go.

I wonder if, maybe, at this point, nobody cares—and because nobody cares enough about the Springer Show, they now do not care about the Springer Hustle, either? I mean, disappointment plus disappointment at that disappointment doesn’t make for much of a new “making-of” show, even if the themes and features are trashy as hell.

Not trashy enough…anymore.

SirLInksAlot Springer Hustle links

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