I was intrigued by last week’s rankings of the most popular daytime television shows in America.  For the first time in over a decade, “Oprah” had fallen from the top.  Perhaps the appeal of the long-time queen of daytime television is in decline.  What replaced Oprah’s smarmy, ingratiating patter?  My goodness, the most popular daytime television show is now “Judge Judy.”

The staying power and influence of “Judge Judy” are noteworthy, especially for those of us in the law.  The show premiered in 1996, and Judy’s aggressive pontificating has inspired literally a dozen copy-cat shows.  Large numbers of Americans love to watch the good Judge and her ilk, and in Milwaukee it is literally possible to watch daytime judge shows continuously from breakfast to dinner.  Dasha Slater, writing in “Legal Affairs,” has dubbed the most avid viewers of these shows not “couch potatoes” but rather “court potatoes.”

Is there cause for concern?  On the one hand “Judge Judy” and the other daytime judge shows are only fleeting entertainment, but on the other hand they project and endorse a particular variety of courtroom justice.  It is meted out without the help of counsel and refined procedural rules by authoritarian figures prone to intense and stinging moral condemnation.  Maybe we’d be better off if people turned back to “Oprah.”

Years before Law & Order ended its incredible twenty-year run on May 24, 2010, the series had staked its claim to being the longest-running primetime series featuring lawyer characters. In addition, the series included an important change in how the heroic pop cultural lawyer is represented. In earlier lawyer shows with especially lengthy runs, such as Perry Mason in the 1950s and ‘60s and Matlock in the 1980s and ‘90s, the lawyer hero was customarily a criminal defense lawyer. Even the fictional firm of McKenzie, Brackman, Cheney & Kuzak in L.A. Law had a department devoted to criminal defense work. In Law & Order, by contrast, the heroic lawyers are always prosecutors.

What explains this very popular shift in imagery? Part of the reason is the general sense that crime has run amuck. Starting in the 1980s, a commitment to crime control replaced the drive for racial and economic justice as the preeminent domestic policy. Any politician on the local, state, or national level who seems “soft on crime” is doomed at the polls. More generally, the Reagan Presidency marked a national turn to the right, and in subsequent decades even the Democrats who have occupied the White House have been moderates. The heroic pop cultural prosecutor is well suited to crack down on crime and to embody conservative values.

Over the years, Law & Order became a genuine cultural phenomenon. The series’ popularity led to spin-offs and to countless reruns of both the original episodes and the spin-offs. In the end, Law & Order in all its forms not only reflected a public sentiment and emergent politics but also powerfully reinforced that sentiment and politics.