More than just a pretty face

At a cool, cavernous TV studio off Sunset Boulevard, Kristen Palacios, 16, of West Covina drags her mother Deborah in front of a judge. The 38-year-old preschool teacher is “on trial” for her wardrobe of T-shirts with wiseacre sayings such as “Your Village Called, Its Idiot Is Missing.”

Judge Henry Roth, a bridal designer, part-time DJ and “fashion expert,” listens intently to the evidence from a bench on the courtroom set. With a tall, blond Icelandic former model for a bailiff and a leopard-print flag flying above his head, he issues his verdict: guilty. The sartorial criminal is convicted and sentenced to a makeover. Is Deborah Barrow embarrassed? Don’t be ridiculous. Her public humiliation is rewarded with free blond highlights, hip-hugger jeans and a crocheted sweater-jacket. “I was nervous at first,” says Palacios, returning from her hourlong hair and wardrobe makeover looking much improved. “But this was really a confidence-building thing. And it was my daughter’s gift to me.”

“Style Court,” a series debuting Monday on the Style network, is the latest entry into an increasingly crowded TV genre. Bravo’s hit, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” features gay men (called the “Fab Five”) making over straight schlumps who seem incapable of tying their shoes without help. ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” which promises self-improvement under the plastic surgeon’s knife, is returning this fall, after a successful trial run in April. “Nip/Tuck,” a new show on FX, dramatizes the world of plastic surgery as practiced in Miami by two dysfunctional but handsome doctors.

Americans are lining up in shopping malls and at casting calls, hoping for the chance to bare their physical faults as entertainment. Wise to the makeover trend, the retailer Express rolled an Airstream trailer onto Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade last weekend so shoppers could have free “style overs,” complete with new makeup colors, hairdos and clothes from Express’ fall collection.

Makeovers always have been irresistible to purveyors of popular culture. “Since the 1950s, home shows and morning shows were doing makeovers on daytime TV,” says Richard Thompson, a television historian and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “But it took the reality television explosion to make people realize that makeovers could stand on their own.”

Thompson believes the makeover is an expression of a traditional American value. “If you had to sum up what the American story is all about, you could do worse than the word ‘reinvention,’ ” he says. “We came over here in Pilgrim times to leave behind history and start over in the New World. The notion of moving West always has been about becoming something else. These shows are a quick way of talking about something deep in the American heart.”

Myra Stark, who tracks trends for the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, thinks the popularity of makeover shows is also a function of the American tendency to elevate the individual. In the age of Oprah, ordinary people can attain celebrity status by spilling their guts on TV talk shows, by starting their Internet blogs or by appearing on reality programs, she says. This everyman-as-celebrity phenomenon, always an undercurrent, intensified after Sept. 11, when firefighters and good Samaritans became instantly famous. In December, she points out, Time magazine’s Person of the Year was neither a statesman nor a titan of business. The weekly’s cover featured a trio of whistle-blowers -- “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

In “Style Court,” convicted fashion criminal Jean Souders, a video producer from Hollywood, is enjoying her moment in the spotlight. Admiring her new pencil skirt and blown-out hair in the mirror, she ponders why, after her co-worker accused her of wearing the same frumpy denim overalls to the office every day, she agreed to appear on the show with him. “Everyone wants their 15 minutes I suppose,” she says. “Or maybe it’s just what we’re willing to do for something free.”

Typically in makeover shows, a fashion sob story is presented, then hairstylists and wardrobe stylists work their magic, and the program reaches a climax in what is referred to as “the reveal.” In “Style Court,” guilt is not a foregone conclusion; the accused do get to defend themselves. A panel of comedians also weighs in, though the judge is not bound by their opinions.

In “The Case of Your Hair Needs a Workout,” Aristotle Ibasco, a nurse from Long Beach, takes his aerobics instructor, Tim Schugt, to court. Ibasco claims he is unable to get a good workout because Schugt’s “Doug Henning” hair is a distraction during step class.

“If you are imposing your standards of style on someone else, how shallow are you?” says the stylishly bespectacled Judge Roth, admonishing Ibasco with the ferocity of a first-grade teacher. “Tim’s hair is what makes him distinctive. We are not all homogenized bottles of milk,” he continues. The verdict? Not guilty.

Many of the stories, particularly on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” are quite poignant, says Linda Wells, editor in chief of Allure. “When there’s someone who looks 20 years older than they should, or someone whose nose dips down to her chin, or someone whose teeth are rotted out, and their lives have been circumscribed by these flaws ... then they are given this opportunity to change, I cry right along with it.” David Metzler, co-executive producer of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” likes to use the word “make-better” instead of makeover when talking about the series he created. “We are trying to inject the show with a positive energy and spirit ... In the end, it’s about the Fab 5 helping the straight guy succeed and achieve his goals.”

According to Judge Roth, a native Australian who says he graduated from the University of Sydney with a bachelor of law degree, TV can be a medium for personal growth. “When I was brought up, TV was inaccessible,” he says. “But that has changed dramatically. TV is now our friend. People turn to it to help them with their problems.”

To some people, these makeover shows are more than summertime TV fluff. “Of course they’re shallow, but I think they are more wholesome than reality shows that have someone picking their spouse out of a hat,” says Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “There is a hopeful message that you can change, and things can be better. Most of the time that we are getting bombarded by good looks, it’s genetic freaks like the cast of ‘Friends.’ We can’t look like them ... they were just born like that. These shows aren’t taking drop-dead gorgeous people and making them look better. They are taking ordinary people and making them look good.”

With the conformist hope of good looks now within everyone’s grasp, maybe the ideal (which parents try so hard to impart to children) that it’s what’s inside that counts won’t have to be imparted with such fervor. “It used to be the dream of all the less attractive people of the world that someone would discover their inner beauty and that their outer beauty wouldn’t matter,” says Wells of Allure. “But now, the dream is that someone will make them over so that their outer beauty matches their inner beauty.”

On the set of “Style Court,” this postmodern fairy tale holds some truth for Souders, the video producer. Back in the courtroom for the “reveal,” her new haircut and sexy outfit so impress Jon Carlson, the plaintiff and co-worker who an hour before was complaining about her overalls, that he takes her hand tenderly and asks for a date.