If you say Judge Judy is finally hanging up her robe after 30 years on TV, it makes it sound as if she never took it off. In the popular mind, though, maybe she doesn’t? When you see her in interviews out of uniform, it’s jarring, like seeing the pastor at the grocery store in shorts and a T-shirt.
Judith Sheindlin didn’t invent the court-TV idiom. Her show built on the 1980s popularity of The People’s Court, a new type of afternoon show in which kindly Judge Wapner heard actual cases and delivered actual verdicts. All the excitement of small-claims court, right in your living room. Wapner had a bailiff named Rusty, and if memory serves, Rusty’s uniform included a gun belt complete with holster and pistol. You suspect that it wasn’t loaded, but it always made you wonder whether there was a lost episode in which a defendant lunged for the bench and Rusty put a few rounds in him before he could get to Wapner. No, they would’ve aired that one. They might have spun it off: The People’s Morgue.
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