While testing out the channel-changing hook-up for my new Series 2 TiVo, I chanced to alight on Court TV and — shame on me — got hooked watching a little of their coverage of the preliminary hearing for Robert Blake. The case against him seems overwhelming, and his attorneys are spending a lot of their time impugning the integrity of those who gathered evidence. One investigator was asked, "Isn't it true you told friends that you were upset you hadn't gotten on TV during the O.J. Simpson trial?" There was also a brief dust-up when a prosecutor referred to the date of "the murder" and Blake's lawyers objected, insisting the word was prejudicial and that it would be better to refer to "the killing." This does not make it sound like they're sitting on a pile of exculpatory data.
Court TV is practically orgasmic to have a Hollywood Murder Case to exploit, and is throwing up specials and daily summaries and Breaking News bulletins. For some reason, during the chunk I saw, they kept cutting to comments by a lawyer who was pointedly identified as "Michael Jackson's lawyer." No, I don't know what he has to do with Blake, other than that tabloid-type journalism loves to link hot stories together.
The defendant is upset with Jay Leno for treating him as if he's already been found guilty. On the one hand, I think that's misplaced anger. If the police are announcing they have associates of Blake to testify that he tried to hire them to whack his wife — and one was testifying when I tuned it — Leno is hardly jumping to or spreading unwarranted conclusions. On the other hand, there is something about Robert Blake that strikes me as so pathetic, the jokes are almost like picking on the mentally ill. (And I guess it's theoretically possible that he didn't do it, in which case the jokes are just helping to destroy an innocent man.)
I know it's not fashionable to feel sorry for violent criminals and if he did it, he deserves the maximum penalty. Surprisingly — for a case in L.A. involving a celebrity — he may very well receive it.
But there's something else here that differs from the O.J. case. Jokes about Simpson always had to be tempered by a proper reverence for the loss of the two people he hacked to death. In l'affaire Blake, no one is mourning the victim because there seems to be a consensus that the deceased was not a very nice person. Blake's whole defense, such as it is, seems to be that there were a lot of people who had reason to want her dead. That changes the dynamic. It opens up new areas of humor and makes the whole thing one big Freak Show with no compassion required for anyone.
Simpson also looked maddeningly arrogant and determined to have a life after the trial. His one-time gridiron heroism caused many to want to believe he didn't do it, and his skin color gave an opening to those who wished to make the case that the L.A.P.D. had racist underpinnings. So he had some people on his side, whereas Robert Blake just looks like a loser; like a guy who did what he's alleged to have done because he was already on the downside of life. He did it, as he did the interview with Barbara Walters, almost as if he had nothing left to lose, his career and a large piece of his mind having long since departed.
I am all for what some would call Bad Taste Humor. As long as it's funny, do it. But I recall that Johnny Carson would sometimes stop doing jokes on a given topic because he sensed that it was beginning to turn too tragic to be funny. And I guess the whole subject of Robert Blake offing his wife is starting to look that way to me.