Sarah Palin, if all goes according to plan, could be the next Judge Judy!
Larry Lyttle and former NBC Universal syndication chief Barry Wallach are behind Palin’s latest venture, a syndicated daytime program in which she supposedly will use her “common sense” to preside over a TV courtroom and rule on ordinary folk’s disputes.
Judge Sarah (or whatever they call it) has absolutely NO legal experience whatsoever. The show wouldn’t launch until the fall of 2017, assuming TV station groups can be enticed to buy it in the next few months.
The money-making potential for the former Alaskan governor and her latest business partners can’t be dismissed. After two decades, Judge Judith Sheindlin, makes a reported $47 million a year for her mega-hit show. TV Judge Tanya Acker, who got her law degree from Yale has a show called Hot Bench and she told The Daily Beast,
“It’s not acting…. It’s not scripted. Not a dime. Not one bit. There is not one part of our show that is scripted even if I wanted to, you can’t script this stuff in advance… Nobody is telling us what to say. You’ve got to think on the fly and be able to react to information, and you may not be getting the information you thought you were going to get.
I don’t have any advice for Sarah Palin. I’m sure she’s got her own advisers.”
Palin is not known for her cogent arguments, witty ad-libs or even making sense, half the time. She seems to do best when working with a script, which she memorizes. The thought of her ruling on cases of regular folks might make for great TV, more for the train wreck quality, rather than brilliant legal verdicts or witticisms.
For his part, RuPaul is on record about his love for Judge Judy,
“The only person who interests me in pop culture right now is Judge Judy. That’s it. Because of the realness — she has kept the story of mankind. There’s a certain decorum and civility that keeps our society together, and it has crumbled so much in the past, really, 20 years. But when you watch her during that hour in the afternoon, she has remembered it and is saying,
‘No! We do it like this.’
And I love it! She remembers the rules of civility. Because if you’ve gotten to the point where you need to go to court to figure out what to do, then you’ve lost your right to be cocky. You need someone. You need a mediator. And she’s that person.“
Judge Judy herself was ambushed over the weekend in Beverly Hills by TMZ and asked for her thoughts on the subject,
“You have to use your common sense… and know a little bit about the law.”
(via The Daily Beast)