WASHINGTON — Joseph A. Wapner, a retired California judge whose flinty-folksy style of resolving disputes on the show ‘‘The People’s Court’’ helped spawn a genre of courtroom-based reality television with no-nonsense jurists and often clueless litigants, died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.

A grandson, Gabriel Wapner, confirmed the death but did not know the immediate cause. Judge Wapner had had several strokes in recent years.

‘‘The People’s Court,’’ which the silver-haired Judge Wapner hosted from 1981 to 1993, was a syndicated half-hour show that turned private arbitration of small-claims cases into highly engrossing entertainment.

Within a few years of its debut, the program regularly attracted 20 million viewers. One measure of its success was a Washington Post survey in 1989 that showed 54 percent of Americans could identify Judge Wapner compared with 9 percent who could name the chief justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist.

For a viewing audience weaned on courtroom dramas such as ‘‘Perry Mason,’’ the Wapner program was a stark departure. Instead of invented murder and mayhem, ‘‘The People’s Court’’ featured unscripted, real-life grievances between plaintiffs and defendants who could be tangent-prone, inarticulate, or alarmingly naive.

Disputes centered on nonpayment for goods and services, unwise lending of money to shady friends and family members, purchases in which the buyer did not beware, and altercations between people and their neighbors’ animals.

The parties, selected from the dockets of Los Angeles-area small-claims courts, agreed to have their matters settled outside a normal court of law and to sign a legally binding arbitration contract. Each litigant was paid about $250 to appear on TV.

The courtroom set, the only fictional component of the show, was presided over by a judge who had spent 18 years on the bench of the Los Angeles Superior Court and brooked little tolerance for unpreparedness and interruptions.

When a litigant told him, ‘‘I’m not through, your honor,’’ Judge Wapner replied, ‘‘Well, now you are.’’

‘‘It’s a case that requires proof, and you didn’t even tip the scales,’’ he told one woman seeking redress for damaged furniture and stolen underwear during a move.

Although he could be gruff, Judge Wapner also displayed a sense of fairness in Solomon-like conundrums.

In a matter involving disputed ownership of a dog between two boys, it was revealed that a third party had improperly taken the dog from the first boy and sold it to the second. Judge Wapner gave the dog back to the first boy and awarded $200 to the second for his careful temporary guardianship.

‘‘He behaved like a judge who had been on the bench a little too long, and that’s what made it work,’’ said Robert Thompson, a television and pop culture scholar at Syracuse University. ‘‘It’s hard to remember what a state of cultural virginity the American audience was in, in regards to what we’d call regular people — nonactors without scripts.

‘‘It turns out regular people are whiny, petty, annoying folks, so Judge Wapner’s crotchety grouch thing was just what we wanted — to shut them up now and then.’’

Judge Wapner, who remained a TV presence, hosted an Animal Planet show called ‘‘Judge Wapner’s Animal Court’’ from 1998 to 2000.

Joseph Albert Wapner, whose father was a lawyer, was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 15, 1919. He initially wanted to be an actor until a theater director at Hollywood High School said he had no talent.

After graduating in 1941 from the University of Southern California, Judge Wapner saw Army combat in the Pacific. While on Cebu, an island province in the Philippines, he was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade and risked his life to save a wounded soldier from being raked with machine-gun fire. His decorations included the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

He received a law degree from USC in 1948 and spent 10 years in private practice before receiving a judicial appointment to the Los Angeles Municipal Court.

He leaves his wife of 70 years, Mildred ‘‘Mickey’’ Nebenzahl of Los Angeles; two sons, Fred Wapner, a judge on the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, of Los Angeles and David Miron-Wapner of Jerusalem; a sister; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. A daughter, Sarah Wapner, died in 2015.