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The Last Lawyer Show
by John Denvir
David Kelley has run the dramatic
gauntlet; first the legal melodramas L.A. Law and The
Practice, then the ironic Ally McBeal, now (as David Papke insightfully points
out) the satirical Boston Legal. I think Boston Legal
is Kelley's last lawyer show; after all, what's left to be done?
 I
like the basic premise of the show. Law has always been is the
symbolic cement that bonds America's diverse society and lawyers
have always been the self-appointed guardians of our national
political culture; it makes perfectly good sense at this point
in our national history to use arrogant, narcissistic, white
male lawyers as representatives of our arrogant, narcissistic,
white male-dominated political culture. When you think about
it, Dick Chaney and Denny Crane are made for each other.
My problem with the show is
not that portrays lawyers negatively, but that it doesn't portray
them negatively enough to accomplish its satirical goals. Kelley
always pulls his dramatic punches, softening the images of Denny
Crane and Allen Shore in order to make them more palatable to
the mass audience television pursues. Therefore, in each episode
we are given a glimpse of a more "human" side of Crane
and/or Shore. We are asked to empathize with Crane for his incipient
dementia or with Shore for his occasional endorsement of liberal
principles like freedom of speech or opposition to the death
penalty. Unfortunately all this does is take the edge off the
satire.
What I like most about the
show is Kelley's weekly video op-ed on some current political
issue of the day. One week we heard a thoroughly one-sided presentation
of the evils of red meat, another a blistering commentary on
the State of Texas' penchant for state-sanctioned murder. Of
course, I probably like these political interventions because
I sympathize with the views presented, but I also find it reassuring
to know that Fox News is not the only outlet for political theatre
on television.
I also think that Boston
Legal will be Kelley's last lawyer show because I don't think
that ABC is going to continue to subsidize his political commercials.
So what's next? I think we need a "no lawyer" show.
Luckily, we have one. It's called Deadwood and I think
it best "law" show yet. Deadwood is a mining camp in
the Dakotas where David Milch has set his HBO drama. Once the
viewer gets by the profanity ( historically accurate according
to Milch) we can see Deadwood as a story about the birth
of law. The denizens of Deadwood would deny this description;
they prefer to see their lives as 'lawless." But the demands
of commerce and the human instinct towards community soon begin
to undermine this pretence to a society without law. Human beings
need both order and justice, although the concrete design of
the institutions chosen to accomplish these goals is always controversial.
By the end of the first season of Deadwood, we have not
only a sheriff, fire commissioner, and a public health officer,
but also a hospice. Most tellingly, in the first year's last
episode (available on DVD) the show's most determined opponent
of law, Al Swearingen, performs a community-endorsed mercy killing
that would make Clint Eastwood proud. And they do it all without
lawyers. Maybe there's a lesson there.
Posted April 1, 2005
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