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Not So StellarWhat Star Jones doesn't get about women, TV, and women who watch TV.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007, at 6:59 PM ET
Star Jones Click image to expand.

It's not that anyone really expected Star Jones' new Court TV vehicle, Star Jones, to be superb programming. This is, after all, a show content with the lofty aspiration to be the next View. Reviewers have been unkind, but the real problem with the show, which debuted last week, has little to do with Star Jones herself. ... The truth is that no host could have saved this mess. The program represents an unholy alliance between two fundamental misunderstandings: a cliché about what women want in television married to a cliché about what viewers want from legal programming. The result is the worst of both worlds.

It's a tale of two makeovers: Star Jones, reinventing herself as skinny and sleek thanks to gastric bypass surgery, and Court TV reinventing itself, yet again, as a reality-television station.

Let's start with the latter. Court TV has announced that effective January 2008, it is changing its name to TruTV and renewing its focus on reality shows (or what it calls "real life" shows). Over the last few years, Court TV has goosed its ratings by focusing on viewers it calls "Real Engagers"—that is, folks who like "action-based reality shows." Thus the network's new lineup will feature less law and more real engagements, including " 'Beach Patrol,' a real-life 'Baywatch,' where cameras follow rescue lifeguards" and " 'Bounty Girls,' which chronicles Florida female bounty hunters."

What any of this has to do with the courts is anyone's guess, although the network clearly hopes to maintain some lingering connection to the life of the law: The daytime lineup originally included a weekday show featuring Nancy Grace (who has since departed the network) and, of course, Star Jones, who supposedly would bring to bear her impressive experience as a Brooklyn prosecutor while "talking about criminal cases as well as social issues and Hollywood matters."

Jones actually got her TV start with Court TV in 1991, covering the William Kennedy Smith trial. She would later bring her glittering law-lite sensibility to The View, where she did her thing for nine years before resigning abruptly in June 2006 when she discovered that her contract wasn't being renewed. Now she brings her legal act to TruTV, and you can't really blame her for thinking there's some natural synchronicity between "criminal cases," "social issues," and "Hollywood matters"—that's long been Nancy Grace's bread and butter. But at least in its first week, Jones' show concerned itself largely with the depressing legal troubles of famous people we either never cared about or are trying to forget having ever cared about ("Is Screech's sex tape illegal?" "Is Britney going to lose custody of her children?").

We know that Jones is treating these matters as questions of law—as opposed to just celebrity gossip—because she brings three important legal tools to the enterprise. First, she has acquired, pursuant to her personal makeover, a pair of Sober Young Mind eyeglasses. Second, she occasionally talks about the law, as when she soberly lectured her nodding guests about how the sentencing guidelines will affect Michael Vick. Finally, Jones frequently reminds us that she likes to do "research," calling to mind the old law-drama montage, the one from every Grisham book: Star pulling an all-nighter with a stack of Federal Reporters open before her and a green banker's lamp at her left, Sober Young Mind glasses perched atop her head.

The strangest part of Jones' lawyerly penchant for research, however, is that she tends to rediscover it only after a segment is over. Following a lengthy discussion last week about the "legality" of CBS' new show Kid Nation, it became clear that neither Jones nor her two guests had any idea whether a) the children involved in the show had accidentally consumed bleach, as alleged; b) their parents hadn't been contacted about the bleach-drinking, as alleged; or c) anything they thought they knew about the show was true. At the end of the segment, Star leapt into action, promising her viewers, "I'm going to find out the facts."

Maybe the next time, before you air the segment?

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of Star Jones by Jeff Gentner/Getty Images.
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