• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 8, 2020

A new Netflix documentary series premieres on Monday by introducing a whole new generation of viewers to the wonders of TV talk shows in the 1990s.

Since it is now going on more than 25 years since the heyday of the numerous and riotous afternoon talk shows that filled so many hours and drew so much media attention in their heyday from the late 1980s through the ’90s, a great portion of the Netflix audience is not old enough to have experienced this phenomenon in person. Lucky them? Probably.

And for those who are old enough, this show serves as a reminder of just how wild the whole thing was.

Understandably, the centerpiece of this show is “The Jenny Jones Show” and the sensational murder case that arose from an episode that was taped in March 1995, but subsequently never aired.

That was the one in which one of the guests, Jonathan Schmitz, fatally shot another guest, Scott Amedure, three days after the taping in the community where they lived, Orion Township, Michigan.

Schmitz and Amedure appeared on a “secret crush” episode of the “Jones” show in which Amedure revealed that he had a crush on Schmitz.

Schmitz, who claimed he was not gay, was apparently embarrassed (to say the least) by Amedure’s overtures -- and angry enough to later shoot him to death.

The murder, along with the two trials that came out of it -- one criminal and one civil -- was one of the singular media sensations of the 1990s (a decade that was pretty much full of such things).

The history of the incident and the two trials gets a reasonably thorough going-over in this show, titled “Trial By Media.”

The series is designed to examine cases in which extraordinary media interest played a part. Other episodes will deal with such cases and personalities as Bernie Goetz, the so-called subway vigilante; Amadou Diallo, an immigrant mistakenly killed by police in New York City in 1999; and others.

In the “Jenny Jones” episode, the Amedure murder is positioned as emblematic of the excesses of the riotous afternoon talk shows of the era.

However, as the documentary itself points out, violence such as this had almost never occurred following the hundreds of hours of talk shows that aired throughout those years.

As interesting as the story is -- particularly for those who are unfamiliar with it -- this Netflix documentary plows no new ground.

It is certainly competent enough, but it has no special qualities, and could have been produced for any TV network that traffics in true-crime content, from NBC, ABC and CBS to A&E, HLN or Oxygen.

One of its problems is not necessarily the fault of the producers. No doubt, they likely tried to get interviews with a slew of primary sources involved in the story -- including Jones herself (seen testifying in the 1999 civil trial on Court TV in the photo above), Schmitz, any producers from the “Jones” show, and even Donna Riley, the mutual friend of Schmitz and Amedure who appeared on the show with them.

But none of these sources, who may have added much to what is already widely known about the case, were apparently available. Or they out-and-out refused.

The show does feature flamboyant Michigan attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who represented the Amedure family in their 1999 wrongful death suit against Warner Bros., and the lead attorney for Warner Bros. in that case, James Feeney. Scott Amedure’s brother, Frank, is also featured in the documentary.

The show offers the hypothesis that the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the civil trial on Court TV in 1999 helped to sensationalize the case by turning this trial about a TV show into a TV show in its own right.

Certainly, Geoffrey Fieger, who had already become famous as the attorney for Jack Kevorkian, was well-aware that he was playing a part on television, and even used the trial’s exposure on TV to sway public opinion and, possibly, the jury too.

But in its actual production, the trial on Court TV was decidedly unadorned with the kinds of bells and whistles we associate with tabloid television. In the case of this trial and so many others, the coverage was more like C-Span than “A Current Affair.”

Court TV did feature commentary by the network’s anchors and in-studio guests during breaks and recesses.

But these were hardly sensational either, and I should know. I appeared on two different afternoons on Court TV during the “Jones” civil trial in April 1999. And I was stunned to see one of them -- a quote from yours truly lasting about five seconds -- in this show, which I previewed on Thursday.

All things considered, I thought that was a very nice touch indeed.  

“Trial By Media” starts Monday (May 11) on Netflix.