Power to The People's Court

It's only two minutes into the Jan. 5 episode of The People's Court and things already look desolate for the defendant.

Since entering the courtroom amid the infamous dah dah doms of the show's theme song, Sean—30ish, red-headed—has been accused of domestic battery, bribery, wrongful termination and child molestation. He absorbs these accusations without a blink.  His accuser is Courtney, a former employee/former live-in girlfriend who kind of resembles Mary Louise-Parker if Mary Louise Parker threw a lot of Tupperware parties.  She's suing Sean for $5000—a national-deficit-esque figure by People's Court standards.  The crowd, which is reminiscent of those lifeless, cubist crowds in old PlayStation baseball games, murmurs in shock as she rattles off her charges.

The domestic battery charges sully Sean the most.  (The whole "child molestation" thing turns out to be a simple "I was 18, she 16" case of high school statutory).   Courtney presents several Polaroids of her bloody head, apparently "cracked open" when Sean showed up to her apartment one post break-up evening and began shoving.
 
"I have hardwood floors," Courtney explains.

Judge Marilyn Milian—the show's fourth and, apparently, "hottest judge in town," according to the show's somewhat accurate opening—examines these photos one at a time, twisting her face in rising stages of horror in response to each. Milian spent five years on the bench in Florida ruling on domestic violence cases.
 
Soon, Milian begins snapping snide comments Sean's way; comments that, considering the judge's respectability as "objective," mud-drag Sean's character way more than anything Courtney could come up with. (This is a tall order, considering Courtney divulges Sean impregnated her twice in four months (!), and subsequently, she says, caused a miscarriage thanks to repeated violence). When Milian asks Sean to describe the night of Courtney's cranial-crack-open, she says, "Tell me about when you hit her." These comments eventually reduce Sean to nothing but a stammering ball of balding sweat:  a man desperate to convince a hostile enemy of his side of the story. It is uncomfortable to watch.

But so are most of The People's Court cases I watch over the course of two weeks, hoping to pinpoint a kind of formula for the show's longevity. Next to Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons, it's difficult to think of any non-news TV show that has lasted as long; P.C. is now in the middle of its 24th season. Although SNL and The Simpsons have both spawned eerily similar programs (Mad TV and Family Guy, disrespectfully), no show in the history of television has been so, let's say, catholic, in its production of like-minded offspring—Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Texas Justice, Judge Maria Lopez, Divorce Court, Moral Court, Power of Attorney, and so forth. P.C. could have fallen victim to this high-supply, middling-demand market, but it soldiers on.

Unlike the prevailing "reality" shows of the day, The People's Court persists because it offers viewers not "reality," but people.

People like Joan, the 60ish New Yorker who refers to all non-Caucasians as fawerners and sues a plumbing company for $185, claiming that a plumber's fat behind bumped a pipe in media res of a job and incited a leak, failing to consider the pipes' corrosion and upcoming 50th birthday.

People like Terrance, on trial for putting his cigarette out on a woman's kitchen table, who brings his wife of 22 years (a woman possessing a tragically three-dimensional mole) to court with him, despite flying accusations of drunken plaintiff/defendant sex.

Shows interested in "reality" wouldn't allow these people anywhere near the business end of their cameras. They would instead recruit Terrance's ironically hot/sassy/alcohol-dependent daughter, if she existed, and drop her into either an exotic locale (Survivor), morally ambiguous syphilitic danger zone (Rock/Flavor/Shot of Love) or both (any version of The Real World).

P.C.'s interest in people is an attribute it definitely doesn't share with its TV-courtroom-show brethren. These shows, most popularly Judge Judy, focus more on their justice-and-sass-dispensing arbiters than their revolving door of litigants.

Although P.C. attempts to spotlight their own judge during the opening montage, the spotlight is evenly dispensed once the cases begin. This egalitarian approach from the show's producers has to be directly affected by Sheridan, who not only crushes Milian in the America's Favorite Sassy Judge category but, according to Nielsen Media, even tops Oprah in syndication ratings.

Despite the obstruction of a suspiciously secretive administrative assistant at Stu Billett/Ralph Edwards Productions, I obtained the phone number for P.C.'s New York office and spoke with an employee named Mike, who outlined how P.C. chooses its litigants. According to "Mike," the show sends field researchers to nearby civil courts to review hundreds of filed cases and select the most interesting. Once they make their selections, the researchers scan the legal paperwork and email it to the P.C. office. From there, employees contact each litigant (plaintiff first) and persuade him or her to appear on the show. Producers conduct no auditions, and only interview their new recruits by phone. Meaning, of course, that The People's Court does not consider physical appearance when choosing its participants.       

It does, however, pay them. According to Mike, each litigant receives a stipend that varies according to the pricey-ness of the case, and several other factors. Losing litigants have the amount of money attached to verdicts subtracted from their initial, negotiated stipend and leave with the rest. In other words, the guilty don't pay for their sins: The People's Court does.

A tidbit such as this could easily lead to a diatribe about the disconnect between actual humanity and televised humanity, and maybe even one about the perversion of justice, but The People's Court has never been concerned with any of those things. Despite the show's impressive line-up of highly qualified judges past and present—Judge Wapner for example, who presided during the show's juggernaut, Rain Man days—P.C.'s producers and stars have never deluded themselves into thinking they were holders of any sort of high law. At least they shouldn't have. The show's true magic lay in its erasure of the line between man and his TV. While watching the litigants argue over security deposits, the viewer at home can cast his judgment in the court of public opinion and know he could someday wind up on the other side of the screen.

The viewer can even laugh at a litigant's expense, even though he is at home at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, wearing his girlfriend's robe and currently sucking the milk from his third bowl of cereal (above scenario not based on personal experience).

P.C. recently took a step to involve even the robed-and-pathetic with the creation of People's Court Raw, a sort of YouTube meets open-mic-Hardball in which two people embroiled in an argument can upload their respective "pieces" to the web and let America choose the winner by voting for the most persuasive. Its website bills People's Court Raw as "the ultimate argument ender," and features several low-cognitive, but funny debates. A personal favorite involves a stoned college student arguing against a conservative middle-aged woman for the legalization of marijuana. America, I believe, sided with the former.

Such a forum would have served Sean well. As it turns out, the man was never guilty of domestic violence. Through a check stub and a text message presented by Sean in which Courtney demanded money "by noon on Friday or I'm calling the cops," Judge Milian learned the defendant was actually being extorted for $2500 by Courtney—who "cracked-open" her own head after attempting to wrestle a dime-bag from Sean's hands. Since People's Court Raw provides its viewers with simultaneous, side-by-side arguments, it avoids the trappings of breaking up testimonies with commercial breaks and thereby indirectly characterizing a litigant as a, for example, child-molesting maniac.

Judging from the purported number of votes on its various videos, People's Court Raw is already extremely popular, and could help sustain The People's Court for 24 more years, if not push it new directions. Both products, however, need only people—and their strange, carnival elegance—to survive. As long both entities mine the bottomless well of human need for celebrity and money, The People's Court will exist long after SNL and The Simpsons disappear from the dial.