On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY By Reuven Frank From Plato to Wittgenstein, Western philosophy has unremittingly wrestled with the concept of reality. It has struggled to resolve the...
...She works at two jobs, and attends school at night...
...It had already learned to discount academic and Op-Ed bemoaning of the "celebrity culture" we supposedly live in...
...NBC, in fact, is actually reviving TwentyOne, the quiz show that precipitated the entire sorry mess and was featured in Robert Redford's movie about the scandals...
...Their conclusions can be read in the products they choose to advertise on these programs and the audiences they imply...
...Couples already divorced come before her to get money from each other...
...Celebrity worship is only one part of this phenomenon...
...Nielsen rating] very quickly...
...Participants are paid to appear, and most programs take assessed fines out of their payments...
...People's Court, run by retired Los Angeles Judge Joseph Wapner, played more than a dozen years...
...These are not courtroom dramas, with plots culminating in trials for murder or embezzlement, but real fake courts, if that makes sense...
...He has never worked...
...ABC and Fox each have one saving them from ratings disaster...
...She had been the subject of a flattering profile on 60 Minutes and written a book called Don ? Pee On My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining...
...Only what is entertaining registers...
...As Ephriam told an interviewer, "We live in a nosy nation...
...Being readied for next season are Legacy, focusing on litigants disputing dead people's wills, and Singles Court, where unmarried couples have at it the way formerly married ones do on Divorce Court...
...What we live in is an entertainment culture...
...The stations Murdoch's Fox network owns in big cities manage even higher ratings with three a day— two before lunch, one before supper...
...Wapner became better known than U.S...
...Nor is this confined to television...
...Mediator Court is scheduled from Disney's syndication division...
...How else explain what has happened to politics, to news in all the media, to magazines, to books...
...TV discovered that trials are entertaining, and thus profitable...
...Ephriam's style, like that of her role model, Judge Judy, is best described as "feisty...
...Now we have Divorce Court— this season's daytime hit, presided over by Mablean Ephriam, a Los Angeles family law attorney...
...and they are easy to promote, especially in those five-, 10- and 15-second spots the networks use to advertise their own offerings...
...double entendres...
...Ephriam ordered him to pay for a new tooth...
...Anything else is white noise, unnoticed, lost...
...It has struggled to resolve the conflict between objective factual existence—what Kant called the thing in itself—and how it is transmitted to the human mind...
...I recently asked an eminent sociologist if it might be useful to study the class characteristics of audiences for all those daytime programs featuring the deprived and forgotten...
...He replied sadly that there was no money these days for research in the field of media, and no funding meant no surveys...
...A major syndicator tackled the problem by hiring Judy Sheindlin, a New York Family Court Judge known as tough on juveniles...
...Audiences were huge...
...Producing such programs costs a fraction of what dramas cost...
...Yet another studio will give us Judgment Dav, with participants "battling over principles as opposed to legal small claims...
...In a typical episode, a woman who married and soon divorced a ne'er-do-well dragged him two years later before Ephriam, asking that he pay half the cost of the wedding...
...Divorce Court is merely the latest success story among daytime court shows...
...The host, says the executive producer, carefully not naming him, is "as tough as nails and extraordinarily charismatic, but does not come across as a moralizer or someone who offends...
...Always with us, they are currently coming back in special versions with those very big prizes that had gone out of fashion during the quiz scandals of the '50s...
...Case dismissed...
...The wedding had been her idea, as were the stretch limousine and her expensive gown...
...voyeurism perhaps a third...
...She also plays often to the courtroom (read studio) audience for laughs— as do many learned and famous legitimate judges...
...There will be more...
...Litigants state their cases in time for the first set of commercials...
...Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and was a sought-after speaker at state bar conventions...
...A different syndicator promises Moral Court, built around arguments over right and wrong, plus cash awards to anyone the host decides has done "the right thing...
...CBS and NBC plan to unveil theirs shortly...
...The format is simple...
...America is hungry for dirt...
...Reality, that is, as seen by Variety, meaning, first of all, "clip shows...
...After the second commercial break in the case cited above, she swept back into court to tell the poor woman, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap...
...The wedding cost $10,000...
...To guarantee that they are entertaining, they have to be synthesized, controlled from inception...
...Now that television has learned how it can still make enormous profits despite audiences less than half as large as they were a couple of decades ago, declared a second executive, "You can put a reality show in there that does the same number but is cheaper to produce...
...All of which sounds much more impressive in German...
...Another category in the "reality genre" is game shows...
...These are compilations of snippets of videotape that originally were home movies, amateur bystanders' pictures of random cataclysms, bits and pieces excised from the tape recording of major programs to exploit risible mistakes, or, Heaven grant...
...Broadcasting & Cable, that he is "trying to take the genre to another level by presenting "not just another small claims show, but another twist with conflict and resolution...
...She cannot actually grant divorces...
...However obvious it was that she married a scamp, he could not be expected to pay for the wedding...
...For example, the entertainment industry's trade paper...
...When it's done right, it gets you a decent number [i.e...
...No jurisdiction has yet ceded that much to television...
...Just as network evening newscasts are replete with commercials for stomach acid remedies, denture adhesives and other aids to the aging, court programs are the favorites of finance companies and of lawyers seeking personal inj ury and medical malpractice cases...
...The program is misnamed...
...Every moment of the Menendez' trial and retrial was live on Court TV, whose ratings soared...
...T. S. Eliot explained it all: "Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality...
...Even in German, however, there is an obvious, inherent paradox in using words to delimit reality...
...It was not a complaint...
...The judge questions them and elicits enough answers to reach a verdict, which she will hand down after the next set of commercials...
...TV has become dirty laundry city," said one executive...
...What is not entertaining must therefore be made to fit the formula...
...The advertising business, though, seems to have done its own surveys...
...In truth, most trials are rather boring...
...they are owned by the networks, obviating high fees to Hollywood studios or other producers...
...Another TV tale of heartbreak, poverty and despair concerned a woman whose husband would take her to movies and restaurants and dancing...
...After an accident cost her a front tooth, he refused to be seen with her in public...
...Then came the trials of the two Menendez brothers, charged with murdering their wealthy parents, and the trial of 0. J. Simpson, accused of killing his wife...
...Judge Judy's ratings soon matched such daytime aristocracy as Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer...
...As usual with these programs, most who come before Mablean Ephriam are poor, minimally educated, gullible, and, when Fortune smiles on the producers, weep easily...
...The whole Simpson trial was broadcast live on several cable channels including Court TV, and parts of it were carried on the networks...
...They divorced, leaving her alone in her room, friendless and depressed...
...Four years ago," an executive was quoted as saying, "before the clip shows started on Fox, there was barely any reality on network TV Now it's become a viable, inexpensive form of programming...
...This is not a new idea...
...But the show was never a big hit, and when, after several years of repeats, it finally ran its course, the principal mourner was Joe Wapner...
...Divorce Court appears on more than 200 stations...
...Wapner's old People s Court returned too, but with Gerald Sheindlin, Judge Judy's husband, presiding...
...YOU may be entitled to a large cash award...
...This appeared in its report that following a disastrous summer featuring repeats of regular drama and comedy series whose minuscule audiences necessitated calamitous refunds to advertisers, the networks had turned to "reality" to recoup...
...Ephriam deals, as all court TV programs do, with petty damages and other small claims...
...The producer of those two programs told the trade magazine...
...Recent clip shows include: World's Wildest Police Chases, World's Funniest Home Videos, Totally Out Of Control, Cheating Death—Catastrophes Caught on Tape, Celebrities Out Of Control, Outrageous TV, Shockwave Cinema, and When Good Pets Go Bad...
...As for daytime television, where most programs are not provided by the networks but sold to individual stations by syndicators, their special "reality" is the simulated courtroom...
...Meanwhile, the syndicator of Divorce Court is preparing to distribute See You In Court and Crime and Punishment...
...Many show two episodes in tandem daily, because that makes for bigger audiences...
...Variety, has coined the phrase "reality genre" to refer to a whole class or category of television entertainment...
...Following a third set of commercials, a divorced couple who were the litigants on a previous program come back to update the court and the audience on their situation...
...turning all human relationships into public confrontation is another...
...Imitators predictably followed: a Southern judge known to be hard on petty criminals, another who judges both legal matters and boxing matches...
...TV builds the courtroom, hires the judge, and searches out "litigants" to argue before its cameras and accept the judge's ruling...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 14
