Judge Judy is pounding her gavel again. And this time she takes us to landmark cases and re-examines whether blindfolded Lady Justice was right or not.

Premiering on Prime Video July 21, “Justice on Trial” will re-adjudicate these cases through re-enactments, court transcripts, and news reports. Once more Judge Judy will reign from the bench.

Before she became famous for her stern judgments and little lace collars on the syndicated “Judge Judy” show, Judy Sheindlin operated in Family Court in New York.

“I loved working in family courts,” she recalls. “I felt as if my presence was a good balance. I shook up the cage a little bit, made everybody a little uncomfortable and less complacent. That was a good thing for the system. But I had been there for 24 years, and when somebody said, ‘Do you want this (TV show)?’ And they couldn't say it would be successful. So I said, ‘I'll give it a shot.’”

That shot in the dark lasted 25 years, and you can still catch “Judge Judy” on some of the streamers meting out justice like King Solomon.

In order to accept that first job on TV, Sheindlin had to give up the bench. “Then I said, ‘Look, you've had a wonderful career and if you're able to — without skipping a heartbeat — take all the skills you've developed over the last quarter of century and translate them into a television program, it's a much larger audience.”

Sheindlin credits her parents for inspiring her passion for jurisprudence. “My parents, especially my father, encouraged me. He was a dentist. In my father's eyes, he always made me feel as if I was a star. If your earliest exposure to your hero figure — mother or father — suggests to you that you're special, that's what you grow up with, that ‘can-do’ feeling about yourself. Rather than parents who say, ‘You only got a B? What happened to the A?’ and insist you take tap dancing and tennis — though your natural abilities lie somewhere else. Whoever said, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ ruined a generation of children because children thrive on things they CAN do.”

In spite of her determination, she says law school was no slumber party. “Law school gave me a bit of a hard time, even though I was at the top of my class,” she recalls.

“There was difficulty applying, etc. I said, ‘I'm going to show them!’ My first job out of law school was (the cosmetic firm) L'Oreal of Paris. I was hired, I thought, as an in-house counsel for their product liability division.

“(Instead) they gave me some drugstores to call to solicit orders my first day on the job, but didn’t give my male counterpart a list of drugstores. That was a short-lived job. I decided I was going to give 100% of my energies, and I was going to see results.”

She saw results all right. Married with children and grandchildren, Sheindlin says, “Life's a balancing act. The way I do it is by being super organized about things I can be organized about. I never put things off till there are a million loose ends in my life.

“I get a bill, I pay it when I get it. Life has a way of throwing you a curved ball, throwing in an emergency, an illness in the family. If you're organized you can cope — and you can organize and simplify as much as you can. I gave up cooking a long time ago when my kids were out of the house. I was very big on bringing food in,” she says.

Sheindlin thinks women need to be more aggressive on the job. “Unfortunately women don’t know how to negotiate. They'd rather be liked than respected,” she says. “I don’t care if you like me or not, but respect me. I like being known as a tough negotiator, as a savvy, wise, tough businessman. Women have been afraid of those adjectives: ‘Oh, she's so lovely, it's lovely to work with her.’ Show me the bottom line! I don’t care whether you like me or not. Pay me.”

Even though she’s strictly by the book, Sheindlin admits she sometimes uses intuition in arbitration. “We women are dual process thinkers. We don’t just go out there, kill the lion and bring it in,” she says.

“A woman says, ‘You're going to kill a lion? First you gotta have the boots and the socks. Then when you come back, I have to have the knife sharpened, I have to make arrangements to have the freezer empty, and what am I going to serve with it?’ He says, ‘I’m going out and bring home dinner.’ We are used to all that life's planning. So we have a certain intuition.”

Whaley costars in 'Saint Clare'

One of the great underrated actors of our time is Frank Whaley. We’ve seen him in “Pulp Fiction,” “The Doors” (he played the lead guitarist), “Field of Dreams,” and you can catch him on July 18 in the film, “Saint Clare.” Whaley plays a friendly ghost of a mailman who was killed by the heroine.

It turns out that show biz is lucky to have him. Whaley endured a troubled childhood and was aimless as a teen. “When I somehow graduated from high school there was a program, an education opportunity program that I got involved in, and they sent me to college free,” he says.

“I studied theater. At first I meandered a bit when I went to the theater and looked around and started to study theater. I was flunking out.

“I had trouble adapting to college. Once I joined the theater program at Albany State that's when my life really changed. It changed everything for me. I was 18. I started studying, started reading like a maniac and reading plays, reading about theater history. There was a liberal arts format that I had to study with my theater major. I was an English minor and started reading books and writing. So there was a quick period of time that turned the color of my life around. It was simply by luck. If it hadn’t happened that way, I'd be in jail or would've died young.”

Cooking show celebrates melting pot

Noted chef Timothy Hollingsworth serves as one of the judges in a cooking show that actually makes sense. Series 4 of “The Great American Recipe” returns to PBS on Friday. This show challenges home cooks to strut their strudel, brag up their briskets and promote their popovers.

Since America is the great melting pot of the world, there are treasures in that pot, and cooks from all ethic persuasions will be on hand to share their specialties.

Francis Lam and Tiffany Derry will be sharing judging honors with Hollingsworth. The chef-restaurateur thinks hopefuls who long to be chefs are making one big error. “The biggest mistakes people are making is not spending the time to get the fundamentals down,” he says.

“That’s the whole ‘celebrity’ aspect of things, the rock-star vision of what chefs are. Yes, I'm on a television show, there’s this ... competition and what not — but I spent years and years and years training and cooking and practicing with the knife and taking things home and studying cookbooks and fluting mushrooms and making dishes at home and practicing how to do things, making pasta at home – just to get better. And that was outside of doing it at work.”

Nat Geo gets its teeth into 'Jaws' 50th birthday

National Geographic dives deep into history when it offers “Jaws @50: the Definitive Inside Story,” beginning Thursday. With director Steven Spielberg’s cooperation, this 90-minute documentary tells everything you ever wanted to know about the making of that sublime seafaring thriller.

Richard Dreyfuss, who starred in three of Spielberg’s movies — “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Always” — says, “Steven is a real simple beast. He is a teller of tales. ... One doesn’t have to believe in God or the devil or resurrection. You don’t have to believe in anything. Just sit yourself down and listen to a great story and within that great story there will be a little moral, a little reason. And I don’t think there’s any more to it than that.”

After all these years of acting, Dreyfuss says, “The most important thing I learned is not to trust my instincts. I’ve been wrong as many times as I’ve been right. So if I have a gut instinct about something, I back it up with someone else's opinion real quick.

“Just because I may have a wrong instinct doesn’t mean I have to be paralyzed and not act. Sometimes I’ve made decisions that were wrong, sometimes right. “ From outside it looks like Dreyfuss’ instinct was right most of the time. “Jaws @50: the Definitive Inside Story” will stream on Disney+ and Hulu beginning Friday, and on Aug. 29 Universal will re-release a new 4K version of the film.

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