Just a heads up, this episode, inevitably, contains outdated and offensive language in reference to the LGBTQIA plus community.

So please use your discretion.

On this season, we'll be covering our vehicles of hysteria, how pop culture and the media shape our psychology and society, and how our national mythologies manipulate the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!

I think television now is overrun with bad taste and bad manners. The Jenny Jones show ambushed this defendant.

Let's go!

You're my .

There was a serious thrill in staying home sick from school as a kid in the 1990s.

Your parents gone at work, you home alone in a slightly dizzy wonder of fatigued possibility.

Still in pajamas, body strewn across the couch, you might click through the

daytime channels, click past the low budget lighting of goofy soap operas, click past an infomercial

for incredible kitchen knives that cut through cans, past Oprah's quiet concern over any number of various

traumas. You know where you're going, to the good stuff, to the glorious shock of sex and just a little

violence, the divine mystery of bleeped-out curse words.

You're headed right to Jerry Springer's special about a mother-daughter dominatrix team,

or even an episode where a man marries a horse.

Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!

Like America at large, kids often seek out the most outrageous thing they can find.

But back in the heyday of shock talk shows, what was considered outrageous was somewhat different.

There are few pieces of popular culture as problematic as what we call

tabloid talk shows or trash talk shows or shock talk. There is unfiltered homophobia and transphobia,

...