Cristina's Court's historic Emmy three-peat

The Emmy for Outstanding Legal Courtroom program has been handed out three times in the history of the Daytime Emmy Awards. As of last night in Los Angeles, Cristina's Court, starring Latina Cristina Perez with television legend Peter Brennan behind the scenes as executive producer, has won all three-- despite being cancelled by the geniuses at Fox months before it took the prize for the second time.

Cristina's Court snatches third Emmy from beyond the grave

Three Emmys in a row.

Cristina's Court, the syndicated courtroom show starring Latina Cristina Perez and produced by television legend Peter Brennan, has made daytime television history with another award for Outstanding Legal/Courtroom Program-- a year and half after its cancellation!

The show stunned the room at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA once again last night as it completed a clean-sweep hat trick in the category that had been created three years ago to give Judge Judy an award.

It is the third time the team has stunned the syndicated world.

The first was in 2008 when the freshman show scooped up the first-ever Emmy for Outstanding Legal/Courtroom Program in 2008, especially because the category was assumed be a cakewalk for Judge Judy, a show that Brennan had produced in its intitial success.

The win by Cristina's Court last year was bittersweet in light of the show's cancellation several months earlier by the Fox Television Stations Group, to make room for a court show featuring Republican politician Jeanine Pirro (GOP adviser and Fox News president Roger Ailes is also chairman of the Fox Stations Group).

Pirro was among the disappointed losers last night as the Cristina's team literally snatched the Emmy from beyond the grave.

How did a show that had been canceled before its last Emmy won manage to do it?

When Fox announced the cancellation of Cristina's Court, enough shows had already been recorded that at least one was aired for the first time within the recent qualifying period. And that show was better than anything anyone else had to offer.

For the second year, the award for the popular Courtroom category was handed out during the Creative Arts ceremony rather than the main, televised event tomorrow at the Beverly Hilton.

Exclusive! Now it's a Daytime Emmy revolt as TV Academy cuts Courtroom category out of live televised show!

While the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has bowed to protests and reversed its plan to move some major Emmy Award categories off the live CBS telecast on September 20th, an equally significant slight has been engineered by producers of the Daytime Emmy Awards.

Producers, talent and agents alike are in an uproar over the decision by the geniuses at the TV Academy and The CW to cut the Outstanding Legal/Courtroom Program category-- the most controversial, sensational and talked-about in last year's Daytime Emmy show-- out of the August 30th live broadcast!

Last year's 35th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards, broadcast on ABC, was the inaugural year for the Legal/Courtroom Emmy. A national prime time audience saw the upstart Cristina's Court and its star Cristina Perez take the top prize in what was considered a major upset. Many believed the category had been invented in order to give Judge Judy a statuette, after years of being lumped in with talk shows-- and losing.

With both shows-- and both women-- nominated again this year, their competition was anticipated as the major grudge match of the 36th Daytime Emmy show. Adding to the drama between the sexy blonde Latina and the crusty New York City jurist was the shocking fact that Cristina's Court had been canceled by Fox midway through its victory season-- and replaced by a bencher starring boss Roger Ailes' GOP political pal Jeanine Pirro.

As popular as the courtroom programs may be-- they out-rate the soaps-- the Legal/Courtroom category has been moved from the big show at the Orpheum Theatre to a nontelevised ceremony at the Bonaventure Hotel the night before. Already, conspiracy theories are floating:

* All the votes are in. Do the producers know the results and want to spare Judy Scheindlin the embarrassment after her disappointment was caught on camera last year?

* Do they want tio avoid embarrassing the suits who canceled Cristina?

* Or are they simply boneheads?

We hear Judge Judy is boycotting the prime time telecast. There's still time to set things right.

Developing...

Exclusive! The top dog behind Cristina's stunning, in-your-face Emmy upset over old Judge Judy

The stunning Emmy upset night as the upstart syndicated Fox show Cristina’s Court beat old standby Judge Judy for the first-ever Daytime Emmy award for Outstanding Legal/Courtroom Program is made all the more tasty because Cristina’s executive producer Peter Brennan basically created Judge Judy as a show and a character as Judy's first EP, guiding her in the new arena while his staff, headed up by Cristina Emmy winner Lisa Brennan, found the cases that put the show a class above the rest— until they moved on.

Weeks before the debut of Cristina’s Court in September 2006, we told you that “Judge Judy’s genius has a new star,” and pointed out that

“…Brennan tells stories like no other, and his team knows the key to a successful court find cases that may not be earth-shattering but are crucially important to the people who are pressing them. They also know to find litigants who don’t look like they were scraped off the floor of Jerry Springer’s waiting room.”

Well, that team, including senior producer Dean Manibog— Katy, Texas’ first Emmy winner (we want to be there for the parade), are polishing Emmys this morning, and must be chuckling that Judge Judy sat stewing at the next table at the Kodak Theatre last night.

As we told you last night, the episode that clinched Cristina’s Court’s prize concerned the shooting of a pit bull.

An animal story. Odd, no?

Not at all. This excerpt from Tabloid Baby, describing the early years (1987-90) of tabloid television, shows how Peter Brennan used the same tried-and-true formula to great success nearly twenty years ago:

Animal stories and tabloid TV go back to the genre’s roots in Australian and British tabloid newspapers... Animal stories attracted calls and letters. They made up for the other sins you put on the screen.

Our most memorable animal story at A Current Affair was about an old dog named Smoke in a town somewhere down south. One day, Smoke ran down the railroad tracks, smack into the path of an oncoming train. When Smoke’s distraught owner went out to see if there was anything left of his old hound, he found an ear, a leg another leg, the tail, a scrap of fur—that was about it.

That would have been the end of the story, except that a week or so later, Smoke picked himself up from wherever he was carried several miles up the track and came hobbling home, minus that the ear, tail, fur and those two legs. It was inspirational, all right. Brennan wanted to run it just so he could write in the promo:

“It was the day the train kept a rollin'… ON TOP OF OLD SMOKIE.”