Judith B. Sheindlin, who delivered sharp yet amusing one-liners while issuing no-nonsense rulings on her “Judge Judy” show, will step down from the bench after dominating daytime television for decades.
The program that made her a household name, “Judge Judy,” ended on CBS in 2021 after more than 20 years. New episodes were no longer recorded and were replaced by reruns.
The show’s Amazon Prime spinoff series, “Judy Justice,” will stop releasing new episodes, Sheindlin’s representative, Gary Rosen, said on Saturday. The last episode is set to air on Oct. 22, according to the streaming service.
Sheindlin, 83, will end a television career that featured her signature plain-spoken and acerbic comments as she disabused landlords, boyfriends and others who appeared in her court.
She is not stepping away from television entirely, though. She will serve as an executive producer for a show starring her son, Adam Levy, a lawyer and a former district attorney in Putnam County, N.Y. The show, “Adam’s Law,” is set to premiere on Monday on CBS Media Ventures, Rosen said.
Sheindlin also has another program in development: “Judyverse,” an adult animated series starring a baby as Judge Judy, Rosen said.
“Judge Sheindlin is not retiring,” he said. “She is rewiring.”
People magazine reported the news of Sheindlin’s departure on Wednesday.
“Judge Judy” first aired on Sept. 16, 1996. In half-hour episodes, Sheindlin presided over small claims cases, adjudicating disputes between roommates over rent, overdue car payments and even dognapping cases.
Sheindlin’s popularity grew when she dug for answers and skewered litigants with her “Judy-isms,” such as: “Either you are playing dumb or it’s not an act,” and “Are you trying to justify to me the fact that you’re an idiot?”
The show, which won multiple Emmy Awards, drew nine to 10 million viewers each day for years.
“They don’t keep me here because I’m gorgeous,” Sheindlin once said in an accent that reflected her native Brooklyn. “They keep me here because I’m smart.”
Amazon hired her to create and star in “Judy Justice” on its free streaming service, Freevee.
“Judy Justice,” which debuted in 2021, led to spinoffs, such as “Tribunal Justice” and “Justice on Trial,” which also aired on Freevee. (Amazon announced in 2024 that it was folding Freevee, an ad-supported streaming service, into Prime Video.)
Before her television career, Sheindlin practiced corporate law for a cosmetics company. She left when the work became unfulfilling and joined the New York Family Court system as a prosecutor, trying juvenile-delinquency and child-support cases.
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch appointed her to the bench in 1982, and she later became the supervising judge of Manhattan Family Court.
“My gift, if you can call it a gift,” she said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times, “is that I understand what motivates people.”
Sheindlin was featured in a segment on “60 Minutes” in 1993, in which the correspondent Morley Safer described her a “five-foot-two package of attitude with a capital ‘A.’”
“To those who confront her, she is an evil queen in a lace collar,” Safer added, referring to the lace collar that Sheindlin regularly wore with her robes.
Also in 1993, she was profiled in a Los Angeles Times article that carried the headline “Law and Disorder: Tart, Tough-Talking Judge Judith Sheindlin Presides Over the Grim Pageant of Dysfunction Known as Manhattan’s Family Court.”
“I can’t stand stupid, and I can’t stand slow,” Sheindlin told The Times.
When she retired from family court in the late 1990s, television came calling.
“The People’s Court” with Judge Joseph Wapner had been canceled, and the production company behind it was seeking a replacement. Within three years, “Judge Judy” had jumped to the No. 1 slot in daytime television, beating even “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
In 2018, Forbes named Sheindlin the country’s highest-paid television host, reporting that she earned $47 million a year for hosting “Judge Judy” and producing “Hot Bench.”
In 2006, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2019 she was presented with a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award.
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