Guest post by Noel Holston

If it please the court of public opinion, I’d like to advocate on behalf of The Advocates, a TV series whose time has come. Again.

For those too young to remember and for those who never caught an installment, The Advocates was a co-production of Boston’s WGBH and Los Angeles’ KCET that aired weekly on public TV from 1969 through 1974. It was revived as a bi-weekly for most of 1978 and ’79.

 Image by Venita Oberholster from Pixabay

The Advocates was vastly more entertaining and enlightening than the so-called “debates” among Presidential contenders on television then or now. Questions were harder to evade. The show was promoted as “PBS Fight of the Week.” The fisticuffs were all verbal, but the show could pack a wallop. More than one intellectual hotshot left the arena with his or her ego badly bruised.

The format, created by Harvard Law professor Roger Fisher, ingeniously recast debate as mock trial, with “attorneys” for the opposing sides of a question presenting expert witnesses to help make his or her case. At its best, it was as much fun to watch as a courtroom sequence on Boston Legal — or a WWE cage match.

You can see vintage installments via Open Vault: https://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/advocates/full-program-video

The series attracted top-tier participants. For instance, when the Equal Rights Amendment was on the show’s docket, the lead counsel in favor of passage was Eleanor Smeal, then president of the National Organization of Women, while the opposition arguments were framed by Phyllis Schlafly, the formidable head of Stop ERA. Political heavyweights such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey popped up as guest witnesses during the run of the show.
The Advocates never won an Emmy, perhaps because there was no category it quite fit. It did win a George Foster Peabody Award after its first season on what was then still the National Educational Television Network, the forerunner of PBS.

The Peabody board’s citation lauded its “bold, invigorating debates of crucial issues” grounded in the producers’ belief “that in a courtroom atmosphere such controversial problems as abortion, smog versus the auto, the use of marijuana, or the danger of offshore drilling could be dramatized and reasonably, if hotly, discussed.”

Most of the hot-button issues the Peabody judges mentioned have, if anything, gained a few degrees Fahrenheit with the passing years. The format would work today on issues ranging from the credibility of climate-change science to the smartest way to deal with Iran or Russia. The Advocates could “try” the realities and misconceptions of Covid vaccinations, election fraud, Black Lives Matter, immigration, even the overall success or failure of the current President’s administration.

What’s more, the potential for public participation in The Advocates is much greater now than it was when it last aired some 40 years ago. We’re well into the age of instant communication, live coverage of high-profile trials and non-stop punditry. If the viewers can cast votes by phone for their favorites on American Idol, why not use a similar phone-in system get an indication of how citizens view various issues and controversies before and after they’ve watched courtroom-style testimony and cross-examination?

Who knows? Maybe the revenues from the phone calls could be applied to election costs or federal deficit reduction.

So, in summation, somebody in the public television system or, if they’re too strapped for funds, somebody at a cable news network should revive The Advocates. It was born in the late 1960s, a time of great polarization and upheaval in America. Watch video of the January 6 assault on the U.S. House of Representatives and tell me a revival is not overdue.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He’s a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.