“I think you’re a crackhead,” said the judge to one of the defendants, and not for the first time, I wondered why I cannot break my habit of watching “judge shows.”
When my mother was alive, she had a passion for watching television shows that featured courtroom shenanigans with judges and litigants. I remember when she hurriedly terminated a conversation with me — hung up on me! — by saying that her “judge show” was coming on. After her death in 2010, I acquired her habit of watching these television legal dramas, most of which claim to have “real litigants” who have agreed to “drop their claims, and have their cases settled here.”
My mother’s most passionate attention was turned toward a young judge named Greg Mathis, whom she thought was “good-looking.” His newest show opens with his statement about someone being a crackhead, but I branched off from Mathis’ original show to the shark in the legal waters, Judge Judy. Judy was ruthless and seemed unsympathetic and I did not stay long with her. My current obsession is with Marylin Milian and “The People’s Court,” a show that debuted in 1981 with judge Joseph Wapner presiding. (In the movie “Rain Man,” Dustin Hoffman plays a character with mental disabilities who measures time by when “Wapner” comes on the TV.) I was with judge Wapner in the 80s, but my present fave is his successor, Milian. But wait: There are more.
There is a show that does paternity testing, with a judge who questions her attendants so vociferously that I must turn down the volume on my TV; another judge presides over a divorce court, where couples — both married and unmarried — present their cases for separation and divorce. And a married couple, both judges, have a “couples court,” a place for people to air a grievance and to have a ruling on its legitimacy. And on the Judge Judy front, she has developed a judge show called “Hot Bench,” where three judges preside over cases and deliberate, argue and come to some consensus on the merits of various complaints. This hot mess has two iterations, with the originals airing in the morning and the successors stepping up in the afternoon.
In the judge show rabbit-hole, opportunities are ripe to view the judgements of various courts, whether they be about paternity, divorce, couple’s counseling, or recovery of monies promised for services rendered. There are even two shows, with “Mom” presiding over one, and “Dad” over the other, that note in the closing credits that neither Mom nor Dad are real judges, unlike the other judge shows.
When I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, one of my friends was murdered at the bar where he was working; I attended the sentencing of one of the persons convicted of the crime. The murdered man’s mother, father and many friends were in attendance and my notes on the event do not reflect a moment that fell to the level of nonsense that I view on a weekly basis. Which begs the question: Why am I watching these shows?
I can’t answer that question, no matter how much begging there may be as to the question. But as I thought of this column, and as I pecked the keys that resulted in the words seen here, I wondered about the replacement things available to me to fill the hole created by my mindless viewing of the judgements of “judges.” I thought of my sketchbooks, that have moldered in the basements of my life, my poems, unrecorded on pages, and unsung songs.
Goodbye, judge shows.
cjon3acd@att.net