Life > April 16, 2003

By Ryan Eanes

Old Gold and Black Reviewer

With summer break rapidly approaching, many of you will find yourselves with at least some free time on your hands. And if you are anything like me, your daytime television surfing will most likely result in the channel staying locked on to one particular staple of daytime TV — the court show.

Court shows exploded just a few years ago and never seemed to fully disappear. The original court show, The People’s Court, started in the ’80s and has survived in multiple incarnations to today.

While People’s Court is best described as “trash TV,” its creators most likely didn’t realize that they had stumbled across a formula that couldn’t fail and that flatly refuses to die.

Consider the multiple court shows on TV today — nearly all of them in syndication, so some that you can see in one particular area may differ from those in other markets. People’s Court was followed by Judge Judy, whose tough on-screen persona was the subject of a Cheri Oteri-led parody of the show on Saturday Night Live.

Today other court shows include Judge Joe Brown, Texas Justice, Judge Mills Lane, and probably a half-dozen others that no one watches enough to remember.

The shows last because they’re relatively cheap — the “prizes” come out of the pockets of the plaintiff and/or defendants, there are only a few salaries to be paid, and the shows can be produced quickly. Ratings are not a vital issue to syndicated programs, as their ratings come as a function of the markets in which they are seen rather than as a proportion of the entire television viewing audience at a given time.

It might be more than a little common-sensical to say that court shows share more similarities than differences.

They all feature abrasive yet fairly reasonable judges, a generic “bailiff” who sometimes has, in all likelihood, a scripted “conversation” with the judge about the episode’s particular cases, cheapish sets that appear to be made of plywood and Gatorfoam, a snickering studio audience obviously more interested in being on TV than actually observing the production and minor cases with just enough shock value to keep you from changing the channel to something more compelling, such as another court show.

Most cases covered on these shows are minor small-claims court cases, never exceeding more than $1,000 or so. Almost always the cases involve annoying, sniveling plaintiffs and whiny, difficult-to-empathize-with defendants who are there to settle their cases on air wholly for entertainment value.

They always represent themselves, usually seem ill-prepared and disheveled, and don’t seem to understand simple rules of etiquette, much less on-screen presentation.

Interestingly enough, if you watch the credits of any of these shows, you’ll notice that the first screen typically discloses details about the cases — usually that the cases are actual small claims court cases whose litigants have opted to drop the case and settle “out of court.”

While that’s not entirely true, the courtroom of the small screen hardly holds the same type of power that the real judicial system does. Thank goodness for that.

Every now and then an adaptation comes out that reinvents the genre, but not really. The two most notable examples are Divorce Court and Moral Court.

The former specializes in divorce cases where property is at stake, and makes for particularly “gripping” daytime television if you consider that the vast majority of daytime television viewers are stay-at-home mothers, sick kids home from school, bored college students, the unemployed and those who work the late shift.

Moral Court, on the other hand, was particularly awful, touting a judge who was purportedly able to settle any “moral” dilemma; ultimately he would award the “contestant” who displayed “superior moral character” a monetary prize.

You don’t have to be an ethicist to be able to point out the problems with this show. For one thing, one would have to be pretty self-assured, and more than a little arrogant, to claim to be able to discern what is absolutely right or wrong in any particular circumstance. The program was never all that interesting and was eventually cancelled, though reruns may air in particular areas of the country.

Court shows will never be ratings winners, and their formulaic predictability will probably never change, but they are an inescapable part of daytime television.

At least we’ll always have soap operas.