A Visit to the World of Daytime TV II, or The Semi-Wasteland of Court TV
By John Ross

Copyright 2007 by John Ross. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given.

My last column discussed the ads on daytime television. Now for the shows…

Daytime programming here (that does not specifically target women) mostly consists of reruns of decent sitcoms like The Andy Griffith Show and Becker, a half dozen or so different Court TV programs, and Jerry Springer. The sitcoms need no discussion. The other two most certainly do, and I’ll handle courtroom shows here. These are supposedly real cases. There is some kind of fund in all of them. I do not know how much if any of the judgments on these shows are paid out of the fund. I can’t believe the people get only travel and lodging paid to have their dirty laundry aired on national television, but maybe so.

Judge Hatchett comes on earliest. Judge Hatchett is a pretty and likeable black woman who seems to handle three kinds of cases. Most common are DNA cases to determine paternity. Next are petty disputes over money and/or property. Then there are the mothers who come on the show to tell Judge Hatchett about a teenager that is out of control.

For the DNA cases, almost invariably the parties involved are unattractive, the men (and sometimes the women) are in and out of jail or prison, there are allegations of rampant drug use, the men don’t have jobs, and the women keep having kids despite constantly choosing to be with men that are clearly not father material. Usually the women say it is “not possible” for anyone else to be the child’s father, meaning she didn’t have sex with anyone else during the period surrounding conception. Half the time, the DNA test shows the man in court is not the father, and the woman who said she was “a million percent sure” that he was the father, starts crying.

If there is a courtroom show out there that makes a better case for the mandatory sterilization of single parents who are on public assistance, I’m unaware of it.

The petty disputes over money are usually pretty boring, and Judge Hatchett is better at giving advice on family matters than she is at reading the riot act to people who do dumb things with money or property.

The “I can’t control my teenager” cases invariably involve drugs, gangs, prostitution, jail, and a thirst for easy money. Judge Hatchett sends the kid off to boot camp, run by a scary-looking, steroid-pumped drill sergeant, to terrify the kid into submission, or to a Habitat for Humanity site in New Orleans, to show how some people have lost everything, and to shame the kid into pitching in and doing something constructive and legal. Sometimes Judge Hatchett herself shows up in a hardhat and with hammer in hand, to work alongside the troubled teen. The treatment always works.

Christina’s Court features an attractive blonde judge who hears a lot of cases involving small amounts of money. One unexpectedly amusing moment came in a case where a neighbor’s large, mixed-breed dog had bitten a woman’s Chihuahua when she took it for a walk (his dog thought it was a rat, said the defendant.) The little dog recovered fully, but the defendant was balking at the $5000 vet bill the plaintiff submitted. The amusing part was that in the summary of the case on the bottom of the screen, which comes on after commercial breaks, it read “Plaintiff claims defendant’s dog attacked her Chiwawa, and defendant won’t pay all of vet bill.” It used the word “Chiwawa” in every summary.

I bet the people on the production crew were a million percent sure they had the spelling right…

Christina’s Court also hears a lot of divorce cases, and since the sums involved are far less than one percent of what my divorce cost me, that show is boring, despite the fact that Christina is cute.

Judge Alex features a handsome, fairly young, and likeable Italian-looking ex-cop and former prosecutor. Judge Joe Brown features a middle-aged black guy with a variety of expressions. Judge Judy is Judy Sheinlein , a slender, slightly shrewish, middle-aged Jewish woman. These three jurists all hear a variety of cases, but most are lawsuits of the money/property/who’s-to-blame variety.

I find Judge Judy usually annoying, Judge Alex to be straightforward, good-humored, and apparently fair, and Judge Joe to be at times the stern father, while on others he’s your friend that does stand-up comedy.

One hilarious case Judge Joe heard involved a computer-savvy guy whose wooden fence had been destroyed in the night by a car that had left the scene. The cops took a report, left, and did nothing more.

The computer guy found red paint scrapings in the fence wreckage, and a small metal emblem that he didn’t recognize. He researched online and found the emblem was from International Harvester. He found a database of International Harvester vehicles in the area, and saw a red IH Scout registered to a guy living two blocks away. He produced a satellite photo of the neighborhood, showing the guy’s house, with a hand-drawn line showing the path the vehicle had likely taken from his shattered fence.

The guy’s name was an uncommon one, so he Googled it and found the guy’s homepage with color photos of his Scout that was for sale, complete with scratches in the red paint on one side, and two little holes where the emblem should have been. He produced photos showing that the height of the scratches matched the height of the paint scrapings on the fence. He explained he had met with the Scout’s owner, asking him to help rebuild the fence, and the guy blew him off. So he sued.

Throughout this detailed explanation, Judge Joe urged the plaintiff to continue with comments like “Ah, yes, Holmes, and what did you then discover?” uttered in what to this ear was a letter-perfect English accent. Judge Joe ended up deciding the computer guy’s estimates on fence materials were way low, and awarded him $500 more than he was asking.

That case was unusually entertaining. Usually the moral in all three courts is either: Don’t lend friends money when they aren’t good at earning it, Don’t sign contracts you haven’t read, or Don’t try to weasel out of something when you’re obviously in the wrong.

I am constantly amazed at the trivial amounts people sue over. One case involved a $170 digital camera that ended up in a swimming pool. How many hours were involved? Whatever happened to good judgment, such as “Don’t have a camera near a pool where teenagers are pushing people in?”

John Ross 5/25/2007

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