Concept
A court show (also known as a judge show, legal/courtroom program, courtroom series, or judicial show) is a broadcast programming subgenre of either legal dramas or reality legal programming. Court shows present content mainly in the form of legal hearings between plaintiffs (or claimants in the United Kingdom) and defendants presided over by a judge, often in one of two formats: a scripted/improvised format performed by an actor; or an arbitration-based reality format with the case handled by an adjudicator who was formerly a judge or attorney. At present, these shows typically portray small claims court cases, produced in a simulation of a small claims courtroom inside of a television studio. However, in 2020 through 2021, numerous aspects of this genre were largely forsaken due to COVID-19, such as hearings transpiring from simulated courtroom studio sets. More so than other genres, the pandemic resulted in transformations that were drastic and conspicuous on court shows, because of their unique nature which demands a transition in disputants for each individual episode. The genre first began in radio broadcasting in the 1930s, starting with The Court of Human Relations, and then the genre later shifted to television in the late 1940s, beginning with such TV shows as Court of Current Issues, Your Witness, Famous Jury Trials, etc. The most widely used techniques in court show genre have been A) dramatizations (scripted or loosely script-directed hearings) and B) arbitration-based reality shows. The genre began with dramatizations and remained the technique of choice for roughly six decades. By the late 1990s, however, arbitration-based reality shows had overwhelmingly taken over as the technique of choice within the genre, the trend continuing into the present. Dramatizations were either fictional cases (often inspired from factual details in actual cases) or reenactments of actual trials. The role of the judge was often taken by a retired real-life judge, a law school professor or an actor.