Judge Judy Sheindlin’s “next adventure” involves AI—and, possibly, South Park.
The 82-year-old daytime TV legend revealed her big idea in a new episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. “Amy, what I want to do for my next adventure, that I would like you to play with me at doing, I want to steal ‘Baby Judge Judy’ back from AI,” she explained.
Sheindlin also told Poehler that she intentionally hasn’t tried to stop the YouTube show centered around the AI-generated baby version of her TV persona.
“I want to take ‘Baby Judge Judy,’ and I haven’t shut ‘em down,” she went on. “I want to get more people involved with this character, and then I want to take this character and create a South Park-y” kind of show, “so that I can Judy-kvetch through the baby. Speaking through Baby Judge Judy would be a whole lot of fun.”
“You need the right writer,” to make the show any good, Sheindlin insisted, and Poehler would be the perfect person to take it on, she argued. Poehler is also a self-declared longtime fan of Sheindlin’s. “There’s a creativity that you have that—you have to know your limitations—that I don’t have,” she added.
The longtime judge turned TV personality decided cases on her trailblazing Judge Judy series for 25 years, from 1996 to 2021—making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
She came right back to television after that long-running show ended with the revamped Judy Justice for Amazon Prime. After producing the judge-panel show Tribunal Justice, Sheindlin added yet another show to her belt and has returned to the screen to narrate and host Justice on Trial, which premiered last month on Prime. The TV judge is looking to branch out into something more creative with “Baby Judge Judy,” a YouTube show that uses deepfake babies to voice the adult participants on past Judge Judy episodes.
It’s unclear who creates the “Baby Judge Judy” series, but the baby character’s hours-long videos are uploaded every few days from YouTube user Culinária Da Evelyn’s account, with each video getting thousands of views.
According to Sheindlin, no one obtained permission to use her voice or likeness for the show, but as the YouTube series becomes more popular, she’s encouraged it will help her “South Park-y” dreams come to fruition when she can recruit “more people” to “steal” the idea—people like Poehler, she insisted.
“Judy’s still pitching me on this,” Poehler laughed. “I’m very flattered,” she added, calling it a “genius idea.”
Sheindlin concluded, “You have to take your next adventure with your station in life. Now, my next adventure is not being a centerfold, I know that.”
