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February 9, 2010 |
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| August 13, 2009 |
By: Jordana Mishory |
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udge David Young snapped his fingers, danced with his bailiff and launched plenty of innuendo from his TV bench.
“There is only one queen in this courtroom and that’s me,” he declared in one episode.
But after two seasons, viewers apparently didn’t connect with his flamboyant antics. Sony Pictures Television pulled the plug on the former Miami-Dade judge’s courtroom television show.
The last episode of “Judge David Young” airs Sept. 4 after a two-year run.
“If everyone could be broken up with the way he broke up with me, there would be no hard feelings in the world,” Young said of the phone call alerting him to the cancellation of his syndicated show.
Young isn’t the only jurist dumped from the TV bench recently. Sony also axed former Miami-Dade County Court Judge Karen Mills-Francis’ show “Judge Karen” after its first season.
Longtime staple “Judge Hatchett” is in rerun mode, entering its second year playing best-of material culled together from its eight-year run.
Sony spokeswoman Cynthia Lieberman said the company, which produced all three shows, is directing its focus elsewhere. “They had a good run when we had them, but we moved on to other products,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just the way TV business works.”
But Sony’s programs did poorly against TV courtroom juggernauts such as “Judge Judy” and “The People’s Court.”
And as the airwaves were swamped by new judge shows, ratings overall have been sliding, according to TV Week. At the end of 2008, Judge Judy led the pack of judicial TV shows. “Judge Karen” was eighth on the list of 10, followed by “Judge David Young.”
During the week of July 27 to Aug. 2, the Nielsen Co. ranked “Judge David Young” 99th out of 133 syndicated shows. Only 0.7 percent of households with a television watched Young’s show, which had an average audience of 914,000 viewers. “Judge Karen” came in at No. 92, with 0.8 percent of household’s tuning in and an average audience of 1.2 million viewers.
“Judge Judy” is the only judicial show to crack the top 25 syndicated shows, coming in fifth, and having 5.5 million viewers. Former Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Marilyn Milian’s “The People’s Court” was No. 38 with a household rating of 1.7 and 2.3 million viewers.
Alex Ferrer, the star of “Judge Alex” and a former Miami-Dade circuit judge, said his former colleagues are the victims of market oversaturation.
Ferrer, who said he called his canceled colleagues to offer his condolences, said his show has remained relatively strong and doesn’t think he’s at risk. During the week of July 27, his show was ranked No. 55 among the syndicated shows.
“There are only so many court viewers out there. If the market continues to get flooded with court shows, everyone gets a smaller piece of the pie,” he said.
Scramble for judges
For several years, production companies scrambled to add more and more court shows, at one point broadcasting nearly a dozen of them. Five featured former Miami-Dade judges. In addition to Ferrer, Mills-Francis and Young, Milian has presided over “The People’s Court” since 2001. She was the first Miami judge to be tapped by Hollywood.
And former Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cristina Pereyra-Shuminer presides over “Veredicto Final” on Spanish-language network Univision. Pereyra-Shuminer joined the county court bench in 1998 and was elevated to circuit court in 2005. Her show, which premiered in September 2007, is still on.
Mills-Francis could not be reached for comment by deadline. Pereyra-Shuminer could not provide comment by deadline.
The Daytime Emmys even created a special category for outstanding legal courtroom programming for the 2008 awards.
But over the past few years, the televised docket thinned out. Maria Lopez’s show was canceled before the 2008 season. “Cristina’s Court,” which won the 2008 Emmy, also will not be coming back for the 2009-10 season. Another court show was on the bubble but made it through unscathed.
Young said he wasn’t sure why the production company decided to go in another direction but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. He said he and his staff heard rumblings about Sony getting out of the courtroom TV business for several months before he officially got word.
“I really expected and hoped that it would be as long as ‘Judge Judy,’ ” Young said of his show.
Milian said the television business — and especially court shows — have an ebb and flow to them.
“Television is a very mercurial industry and you don’t know what’s going to make the difference in staying on the air,” Milian said.
She cites her good fortune to be tied in with a franchise that’s been around for a quarter century, and hopes she has more good years left to come.
“When they pry my cold dead fingers off my gavel, that’s when I’ll go,” Milian said.
Despite the cancellations of competitors, Milian expects more court shows in the future because they’re relatively cheap to produce with no actors to pay and simple, reusable sets.
Ferrer compared the influx of court shows to having 15 talk shows fight for viewership.
“You can’t keep pumping more copycat shows out there because you really start thinning it out,” he said. “The ones that suffer the most will eventually get shaken out, and the Oprahs and the Ellens will remain because they will be the stronger ones, and they will absorb the viewers watching the other shows.”
Ferrer said his successful launch in 2005 prompted other production companies to follow suit. Production companies already had been shying away from courtroom shows because of a previous shake-out. The fifth season of “Judge Alex” is about to start in September, and he is about to tape his sixth season.
He resigned from the Miami-Dade bench after 10 years to do the show. At the time of his resignation, he was a finalist for an appointment to the 3rd District Court of Appeal.
“TV is a year-to-year business. I knew that when I took a plunge, that I could be leaving my career as a judge and have one year in television and be out of a job,” Ferrer said. “That’s a risk that I took, the risk that everyone took.”
Young was plucked from the bench after presiding over the 2005 televised criminal trial of two America West pilots accused of flying while drunk. Young, the first openly gay TV judge, served on the Miami-Dade bench starting in 1993 as a county court judge and then as a circuit judge beginning in 2001. He left the bench in May 2007, and the show aired that September.
Before his Daytime Emmy-nominated show leaves the airwaves, Young will tackle the cases of the “Beauty Shop Beatdown,” “Cowboy Feud” and “Searching for Mr. Dad.” He has presided over 260 episodes.
“I loved every minute of it,” Young said. “I loved DNA cases that brought families together or brought closure to women who thought this man was the biological father, and dealing with people’s lives and trying to send a message of right and wrong and what to do and what not to do.”
During his run, Young had a cameo appearance on “The Young and the Restless” and attended the Daytime Emmy awards as a nominee in the court show category.
The show transformed him into a national gay role model. Young, whose longtime partner is Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Scott Bernstein, recalled being approached by a gay male viewer in Miami. The viewer told him his relationship with his parents soured when he came out, but Young was a gay public figure whom his parents could relate to.
Young said he wanted to show viewers that judges don’t have to belittle litigants to get their message across.
TV judges have no true judicial authority. Instead, they provide binding arbitration in disputes generally involving less than $5,000. Before appearing, plaintiffs and defendants must sign agreements promising to accept the decision. Parties represent themselves and rulings are based on the law of the jurisdiction where the case originated.
A number of cases are found in real life courthouses.
Since he stopped taping last fall, Young said he has served on President Obama’s statewide financial committee and filled in as host on the Sirius radio network’s OutQ Radio, which targets a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender audience.
For now, Young is keeping his options open.
“If someone came to me and said, ‘I want to continue the Judge David Young show, and we’re going to pay you a significant amount of money to do it,’ I would,” Young said. “But I don’t see that happening in this economy.”
He is considering returning to public office or the practice of law. Alternatively, he would like to be the next Anderson Cooper or Larry King.
“I promise not to wear any suspenders,” Young said.
Jordana Mishory can be reached at (954) 468-2616.
David Young photo by Melanie Bell |
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