A court show (also known as a judge show, legal/courtroom program, courtroom series, or judicial show) is a broadcast programming genre comprising legal dramas and 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 in one of two formats: scripted/improvised with an actor portraying a judge; 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. As an exception, from 2020-2021, 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, court shows withstood transformations stemming from the pandemic that were drastic and conspicuous, due to their unorthodox process of interchanging defendants for each individual episode.
Court shows first began in radio broadcasting in the 1930s, starting with The Court of Human Relations, and evolved with the introduction of television in the late 1940s, with programs such as Court of Current Issues, Your Witness, Famous Jury Trials, and more.[1]