What ever made anyone think that Americans are entertained by lawyers? This seems like such a self-evidently bad idea that Court TV should, by now, have switched to the business of selling zirconium-studded handbags.

Yet on Nightline, Larry King (the show, not the man), and whatever that program is that runs all day on CNN, we have a new kind of celebrity — a boring kind, the kind that used to write vocabulary words on three-by-five cards during the prom. It’s as if all the seats in the Hollywood Squares were mysteriously taken over by your accountant and eight people from your old high school debate team.

In the center square this week is Geoffrey Fieger, a noted attorney who, it has just been announced, will soon have his own daily syndicated TV show with OJ alum Christopher Darden, Buttafuoco barrister Dominic Barbara and the real-life Erin Brockovich’s employer Edward Masry — a prospect that makes me nostalgic for the relatively brilliant show business chops of Magic Johnson. Like any entertainment giant, I’m sure Fieger had a lot of projects to consider. But he accepted this one, he said, because, "I think America would get a kick out of seeing me more often than on Court TV."

Yes, friends, that is the faraway thunder troubling your innocent slumbers — a general clambering for more of Geoffrey Fieger. You know ... Geoffrey Fieger. The guy who, uh … Well, he represented Jack Kevorkian, and the plaintiffs in the Jenny Jones wrongful death trial. And he ran for governor of Michigan once. So, you know, we’d all … get a kick out of seeing him…

As it happens, I worked for a little while at the aforementioned Court TV, where one of the prevailing delusions was that an upscale lawyer’s characteristic blend of cynicism and contrived ideals could be seen — if you squinted real hard — as kind of roguishly charming. But it seems to me the public regards lawyers the same way that (to my eventual misfortune as a member of a start-up show on that network) it turns out they regarded Court TV: to be visited only when absolutely required.

Not that some of my very best friends have not been lawyers. I have known many, many, many, many lawyers. I’ll bet you have known many, many, many, many, many lawyers as well. Because there are, like, a billion of them. But you know what people would rather watch instead?

Corn growing.

While the American public feverishly prepares to ignore Fieger’s new show, tens of thousands of Internet users a day are trampling over each other to look at CornCam, a web camera that sends pictures — updated every 15 minutes — of a cornfield in Monticello, Iowa. About 20,000 people have hit http://www.iowafarmer.com/corncam/corn.html in just one day alone, though all I’ve been able to see on it so far is that it’s getting dark in Iowa right now, and there’s a storm a-comin’.

I think we like the cornfield — which belongs to Jim and Sharon Greif — because it doesn’t tell us what a "kick" we get from looking at it. It doesn’t go on Larry King Live to tell us about the important things it’s doing. "Well of course, Larry," it doesn’t say, "I supposed I could work anywhere. But I think the most crucial thing I can do right now is stay here in Colorado and feed Jon Bennet Ramsey’s parents."

It doesn’t brag, it doesn’t collect sports cars, it didn’t join a fraternity at Harvard and make out with sociology majors. The corn just does it’s job, which is to keep growing until we mow it down next autumn, dye it blue and turn it into over-priced tortilla chips. The corn does what it’s supposed to do, then it disappears.

That’s what I’d really like to see — more high-priced lawyers who turn blue and disappear.