Ill Legal

I tend to avoid watching shows about lawyers, because they make me lose critical distance.  It's personal for me; I just have a lot of difficulty watching them impartially.  Lawyer shows often ignore the fact that the law is an extremely regulated ethical environment, and to the extent that they do portray any of the (intense) ethical obligations of lawyers, they tend to portray lawyers as ethically-challenged, just looking for ways around those obligations.  This fundamentally turns the truth of law practice on its head.  I don’t mean to say that every lawyer is ethical—there are bad apples in every profession, and unethical lawyer stories hit the press every so often—but the very fact that we hear about it when lawyers are unethical highlights the rarity of those ethical breaches.  (In fact, the vast majority of ethical breaches in the law involve desperate, misguided lawyers “borrowing” money from their clients’ accounts, and getting disbarred for it.) 

I absolutely understand why these shows do it—stories about totally normal people doing totally normal things are much harder to make interesting than stories about people walking close to the edges of bad ideas.  So I can’t criticize the shows for doing the same thing to the law that I often enjoy when it happens to other professions in other shows.  House was a terrible example of a doctor. Being a bodyguard probably looks nothing like Human Target, and being a spy probably looks nothing like Covert Affairs.  Solving crime surely doesn’t happen at the pace of TV.  Forensic criminalists surely almost never interrogate witnesses.  But somehow I can enjoy these deviations from the truth, and can't the same thing with law.  Maybe it’s just that, as a legal professional, I’m more sensitive about law.  I’d expect doctors to be just as uncomfortable with House.  But also, I’m concerned that the consistent portrayal of lawyers as ethically-challenged feeds recursively into the way TV viewers actually view the legal profession.  “Lawyer jokes” play on the same false traits that TV often portrays.  And legal ethics—as strict and moral as they are—can genuinely look strange from the outside.  (For example, client confidentiality is a crucial element of law practice, because the system needs clients to trust their lawyers.  But it also means that sometimes lawyers know things that they can’t disclose, which looks strange to non-lawyers.  Likewise, lawyers sometimes have to make alternative arguments—“he didn’t do it, but if he did, it was justified”—that can seem disingenuous from the outside, even though they can be important to the law’s process of finding justice and resolving disputes. )  So my concern is that these consistent portrayals of lawyers as unethical, just like consistent portrayals of gender or race stereotypes, can bleed in and out of public perception just as unfairly as those other stereotypes do.  

So, to sum up, I have trouble watching law shows impartially.

But with that caveat about critical distance, I wanted to watch these three shows because each featured a female protagonist embarking on major personal challenges.  What I found sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't, but sadly brought me right back to the stereotype bin.  Each of the three shows takes radically different approaches to the law, but they have one thing in common:  each portrays its female protagonist as independent, opinionated…and a slave to her emotions and sexuality. 

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC, new. Legal drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Law students assist their professor’s criminal defense clients in ethically unacceptable ways.

Promise:  As a show about law (and especially about law teaching), this is totally offensive.  The law professor encourages her first-year law students to miss meetings other essential courses, rewards them for unethical practices like lying and destroying evidence, and doesn’t actually teach them anything about the law.  In recent years there’s been a move toward “experiential learning” in law school, and there’s a good reason for that:  lawyers learn by doing.  And here, this professor is teaching them to do things directly aimed at separating the students from their moral cores, and that’s appalling. 

But setting aside my feelings about how this show portrays the law and legal education, I have other critiques.  I was hoping to really enjoy another show about a strong woman of color, but I found this portrayal too mired in stereotypes to enjoy it.  The protagonist’s bad decisions in the pilot seem consistently based on irrational emotionality and sexuality, which combine for a heady mix of bad decisions.  For example, she blames her unethical sexual promiscuity on the fact that she and her husband have been talking about having children, which apparently pings some emotional button for her.  The whole show seems tied not only to the “women are irrationally sexual beings” trope but also to another trope that I may do a whole post on, sometime—that women can’t be wholly competent because they just have too many feelings.  And on top of that, she’s mean.  Mean characters can be interesting—House was mean, and I loved watching him—but unlike House, this protagonist doesn’t have a foil.  House works as a character partly because Wilson reminds us that there is something likeable about him, and works as a force to check his crueler impulses.  But this character has such complete control over everyone in her life that there’s nothing to stop her from just seeming evil.

All those things aside, though, this show has much the same juicy stories and team dynamic as Scandal, and juicy teamy stories can be a lot of fun.  So If you like Scandal—and at times, I really have—t’s reasonable to like this.

Verdict:  Problematic in a whole bunch of ways, but not without juicy appeal...for people who won't want to throw things at the TV like I do when I watch it.

 

Bad Judge (NBC, new.  Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: A judge is a total mess personally, but a surprisingly good jurist.

Promise: This show aims for a sort of updated Night Court vibe in places, and that's fun.  It, too, undermines the dignity of the legal system, but I’m less surprised and disappointed by that, because it’s a sitcom and I don’t look to my sitcoms for dignity.  In fact, despite the protagonist’s terrible personal decision-making, I'm somewhat heartened that it shows her making generally competent decisions from the bench. I am troubled that the judge’s colleagues seem to criticize her for her caring, which really isn’t actually how being a judge works (or should work, for that matter).  My chief concern here, though, is that for all her intelligence and compassion, this woman, like the previous protagonist, is a total slave to her emotions (shirking professional duties to look after a child in need makes her a good person, but not a dependable public servant) and her sexuality (with amusing, but undignified and stereotype-promoting results). 

Verdict:  Has some charm and some heart—much the same sort of heart as Bad Teacher, and many of the same problems—but not funny enough to merit the time.

The Divide (WeTV, new over the summer.  Legal drama.)

Watched:  Most of the first season

Premise:  The swirling impacts of the Innocence Initiative’s reinvestigation of a death row case.

Promise:  This is a particularly compelling take on the law, presenting a more nuanced look than most at the strengths and vulnerabilities of the system—particularly the vulnerabilities, and particularly the influence that prejudice can have on the justice process.  Like The Killing, it reaches beyond the mystery and delves into the way the case influences everyone it touches.  The story is awash with moral ambiguity:  in the pilot, we encounter a convicted man who is far from an innocent, but also happens to be the victim of a complicated conspiracy and rush to judgment, fueled by the sorts of ethical lapses that may mean well, but have destructive results nonetheless.  His story triggers a complicated web of consequences that carry the show through the season, revealing larger conspiracies that highlight issues of race and privilege and how they can contort the law.

This show isn’t particularly kind to its attorneys, but—like The Wire—when it depicts the system being bent out of shape, it feels more genuinely critical than sensationalized.  And its protagonist—a young woman studying for the bar exam while interning at the Innocence Initiative in the wake of seeing her father (possibly wrongly) put on death row—seems like a real person.  She, like the previous ones, is driven by her emotional attachments, but in a way that seems less like a stereotype about women and more like the consequences of the kind of personal obsession that anyone could develop.  What’s different about it is that she has a reason for her emotions, other than just being female.  The cast is an impressive assemblage of TV pros, including a few from The Wire, and the show has a similar tone and complexity.  It was originally created for AMC, and I can see why—WeTV did well to pick it up, but I have seen almost no promotion for the show, which was a mistake.  It could have been a water cooler show.

Verdict:  Not always easy to watch, but still worth Netflixing.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  A few lingerers from the summer, and a whole giant bunch from the Fall.  Dominion, Tyrant, The Almighty Johnsons, The Knick, Legends, Z Nation, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Scorpion, Forever, NCIS: New Orleans, Stalker, Gracepoint, Survivor's Remorse, The Flash.