Comedian Ant on VH1s Celebrity Fit Club
In his recent Reason article on “justice porn” Greg Beato notes, in passing, that the realistic sets of tv courtrooms reimagine real courts as so many “fetish props” assembled.
“But instead of emphasizing their status as private arbitrators who offer a different approach to dispute resolution than the U.S. court system, they present themselves as that system—or rather, an idealized version of it. In justice porn, gavels and bailiffs and American flags are kept around like fetish props, but procedural niceties, endless testimony, and other forms of legal foreplay are dispensed with. All power is consolidated in the hands of a single capricious authority, judgments are rendered swiftly and permanently, and even if the metaphorical glove don’t always fit, defendants get the punishment they deserve. Sometimes the plaintiffs do too.”
Though tv courts are real courts that only happen to be on tv, the real fixtures of the courtroom set nonetheless assume an ambivalent, fictional status. The gavel, the flag, and the judge all take on a cartoonish dimension that at once belies and expresses the justice system they mock and serve.
But if reality tv courtrooms theatricalize justice, other reality tv programs just as well ‘judicialize’ theater. Courtroom fixtures themselves are indeed often incorporated into the background or set of otherwise extra-legal ceremonies.
To take just one example, the panel judgment that concludes every episode of Celebrity Fit Club is designed to approximate, visually and procedurally, a trial or hearing. The panelists themselves sit behind a characteristically judicious bench, made of solid wood, while the contestants are arranged beneath them in a manner that invokes a church as much as a courtroom. In the final decision, the two teams climb up onto a giant scale of justice to see which half has lost the most collective weight since last week’s episode.
Celebrity Fit Club contestants
Celebrity Fit Club panel
