150 Channels and Even More Lawyers

Many people--excluding those who support themselves by coming to abrupt stops and yelling about soft-tissue damage--would probably be happy to go the rest of their lives without needing a lawyer. Others approach receiving a jury-duty summons as if the Angel of Death himself just arrived at their door.

A recent tour of jury service in the Municipal Court drove home the latter point, unless your particular cup of tea is waiting around for hours with nothing much happening, then listening to inarticulate attorneys and judges who address you like a 6-year-old: “You’ve heard that we have a Constitution, haven’t you, ladies and gentlemen?” “Perry Mason” it wasn’t.

Granted, people aren’t crazy about doctors either, but you often don’t have a choice about seeing one of them. So assuming many share this aversion--feeling as squeamish walking into a lawyer’s office as they do watching an operation on the Learning Channel--then why is the legal system so ubiquitous on television?

CBS in particular seems to love the law. Three of its six new series take place in legal settings: “Work With Me,” a sitcom about two married lawyers who go into business together; and the dramas “Judging Amy” and “Family Law,” which both got off to a reasonably promising start, ratings-wise.

You can make a case, pardon the expression, for the likes of such prime-time series as “Law & Order” and “The Practice,” which tackle life-and-death issues at a lightning-fast pace. Crime, investigation, trial, verdict in an hour--the legal equivalent of those one-hour photo processing stores.

Really, though, someone please explain “Judge Judy” and her innumerable clones, including a revival of “The People’s Court” that places her husband, Jerry Sheindlin, on the bench. Do you honestly care about some woman trying to recover cash after naively buying her shiftless boyfriend a car, or an odd man suing an even creepier neighbor for allowing her Lhasa apso to rip up the yard?

Seeking to better understand this preoccupation with the legal profession, these questions were put to Henry Schleiff, president of Court TV, a 24-hour cable network that made its mark televising high-profile trials involving O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers.

Despite the notoriety of these cases, anyone who has sat through a real trial knows they seldom rise to the level of high drama--nor, for that matter, do many of the attorneys look like “The Practice’s” Dylan McDermott and “Law & Order’s” Angie Harmon, the latest in a line of stunning assistant district attorneys. Even the two new CBS dramas have as much to do with the lives of their attractive leads as newly single women as filing briefs.

Schleiff, a lawyer himself, argues that the judicial system’s entertainment allure shouldn’t come as a surprise, despite whatever qualms people might harbor about it.

“The last thing people want to do is be involved in a car accident, but people will certainly stop and watch,” he noted.

“People will watch a trial, even if it doesn’t have the dramatic pacing of a fictional example of it, in part because it’s not so much about trials or law alone. I think people are a little bit bored at this point with another version of ‘Friends.’ . . . What people are searching for, from an entertainment perspective and from the informational side, is reality. The opportunity of seeing an unvarnished reality appeals to people. It’s certainly becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to the more mundane network fare.”

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Perhaps foremost, what Court TV and many of these assorted programs offer is a sense of justice, of fair play. This stands in stark contrast to local newscasts, which by emphasizing “If it bleeds, it leads” values often provide gruesome details of that day’s latest atrocity without the reassurance or satisfaction of hearing someone has been caught and punished.

Citing that dynamic, Schleiff maintains Court TV has become less about the legal system than the administration of justice, something for which people are hungry--even if it’s being meted out by a robed cartoon character such as Judge Judy.

“People want closure,” Schleiff said. “They want to hear what drove a person to do it, why they did it, and they certainly want to see that person get their just deserts. That’s what a channel about justice is all about.”

By contrast, in most newscasts such closure is long deferred, making the world seem out of control and dangerous.

Such news reports serve to create awareness of cases later covered and resolved on Court TV, prompting Schleiff to say only half-jokingly, “We have the largest and most well-financed promotional department in the world, hereinafter referred to as the combined reach of broadcast and cable news operations.”

Court TV still runs complete trial coverage by day, when people are accustomed to watching soap operas and view TV at a more leisurely pace. Yet far from being “TV Land for lawyers,” these cases become a sort of real-life serial for viewers, who project their own entertainment values onto the proceedings--picking out their favorite “characters,” the trial’s “good guys” and “bad guys.”

Small wonder, then, that Court TV has seen its prime-time ratings increase sharply since embracing a more conventional entertainment formula, presenting real-life crime and justice in nifty, easily digestible little packages. The revamped evening lineup includes documentaries, programs about the law and even reruns of the dramatic series “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

Having suffered from the same syndrome as the Weather Channel--where ratings go through the roof if there’s a hurricane but languish otherwise--Court TV didn’t want to depend on another O.J. to sustain viewing. Schleiff makes no apologies about the shift in direction.

“We want Court TV to be known as this all-night diner you can come to if you’re interested in stories that deal in the broad genre of crime and justice,” he said. “We offer something different, alternative and even important from time to time. That’s what the promise of cable was all about, wasn’t it?”

Indeed, except that Court TV’s actual lawyers apparently will have to fight through an army of fictional ones to gain the attention many of them seek, which even in theory is enough to produce a stiff pain in the neck--minus the usual tap on the fender that precedes it.

Admittedly, some lawyers might take offense at this, but hey, you can’t please everyone, so sue me.

Uh oh . . .

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Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.