Judges On Reality TV

Cynthia Bond, John Marshall Law School, has published "We, the Judges": The Legalized Subject and Narratives of Adjudication in Reality Television at 81 UMKC Law Review 1 (2012). Here is the abstract.

At first a cultural oddity, reality TV is now a cultural commonplace. These quasi-documentaries proliferate on a wide range of network and cable channels, proving adaptable to any audience demographic. Across a variety of types of “reality” offerings, narratives of adjudication — replete with “judges,” “juries,” and “verdicts”— abound. Do these judgment formations simply reflect the often competitive structure or subtext of reality TV? Or is there a deeper, more constitutive connection between reality TV as a genre and narratives of law and adjudication?
This article looks beyond the many “judge shows” popular on reality TV (e.g. Judge Judy, etc.) to examine the law-like operations of the genre itself, and how legal narratives dovetail with the increasingly participatory nature of our “convergence culture.” In addition, this article examines the ideologies these shows represent regarding community, and particularly the role of the legalized subject within this community. How does the prevalence of images of judges and judging on reality TV fit into previous notions that media audiences empathize with legal processes by identifying with an “on-screen” jury, embodying shared, democratic decision-making? Do these shows play on pop cultural narratives of conflicts between judges (within the show) and juries (the viewing audience)? Finally, do such shows empower spectators by engaging them in democratic “knowledge collectives,” or instead represent a neo-liberal “technology of governmentality”? Ultimately, through its enactment of a range of adjudicatory and quasi-legal narratives, reality TV emerges as a highly regulatory space. Law is a compelling narrative for recirculation in a contemporary media culture marked by contestations of authority and community, as the interrelationships between cultural producer, text, and cultural consumer shift and are redefined.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.