Mon, September 4, 2006
Razzle Dazzle
Lo and behold, the EW fall TV preview finally arrived this week. With Patrick Dempsey on the cover?! The fuck? If you're not leading with Peet, Perry, and Brad Whitford, you're not previewing the same fall season I am.
Meanwhile, Fox's season of infamy continues to unfold. Every ad I see for Standoff, I'm more convinced that it's a big prank they're perpetrating against us. Maybe the American Idol Network is just trying to turn us against scripted television for good.
Justice
(Fox, 9:00 Wednesdays)
I have to say, Justice surprised me... a little. For one thing, it's been a while since I had me a nice Victor Garber fix, and I'd forgotten just how satisfying that can be. You have to make a show pretty bad for me not to enjoy watching him in it. Which they almost do, but not quite.
The premise of Justice is to examine a part of the legal process that we don't really see in the other 97 lawyer/cop shows currently on TV. Rather than the quirky, abrasive, but ultimately cuddly sort of law we see on Boston Legal or the breastfeeding, hippy, hysterical sort of law we see on Close to Home, this is expensive, media-blitz, morally relativistic law. Garber's law firm, TNT&G, is the sort of place Shark used to work before he joined the DA's office. They represent über-rich, celebrity clients; they try the case on TV as well as in the courtroom; they don't really care if you're guilty or not.
The challenge is how to make these the good guys. You don't have to love the main character of a TV show to enjoy watching it, but you do have to identify with him somewhat. With James Spader on Boston Legal, it's a delicate high-wire act. Sure he's smarmy, cocksure, and devious, but at the end of the day he wants to do the right thing. Sadly, the tactic employed by Justice seems to be: we can't make these guys good so we'll just make everyone else super evil. The DA is like every other DA you've seen (except for the shaggy kind): power-mad, easily jumps to conclusions, obsessed with getting a conviction regardless of whether he's got the right defendant. Additionally, the media is vile, slanderous, and intrusive. Gone are the post-Richard Jewell days of carefully inserting the word "allegedly" and maintaining a modicum of journalistic objectivity. The Court TV-type show featured in Justice regularly editorializes on the guilt of Garber's client, and also shows graphic crime scene photos. The show really strains plausibility in its attempt to make TNT&G the lesser of three evils. Unfortunately, we're all plenty familiar with how bad broadcast journalism is these days – they don't need to remind us, and they won't succeed trying to exaggerate it, either.
It's also a little confusing why clients who aren't guilty would hire this firm. Seems like if you're innocent you'd know you don't need all the expensive extras to avoid conviction. The show's response to this seems to be: the DA is out to get everyone! No one is safe! Week to week, it may be challenging to come up with new ways for the evidence to stack up against innocent people so they need the glamorous law firm to rescue them.
One sign that someone at Bruckheimer HQ is asleep at the wheel: you know how every frickin' TV show now has those dumb CGI transitions where you travel through the cell phone and along the wires and whatever? Justice has 'em too, but instead you're going through a car window, or through a tile roof, some attic trusses, and a ceiling before finding the defendant in his living room. My question is, why do the tile roof and the car window still make those digital squinks and bleeps?
The show has its good points. (For one, Garber! He easily cancels out Kerr Smith, my second least favorite Dawson's Creek alum.) It's fairly smart, and not afraid to get ahead of the audience a little. This was among my favorite qualities of The West Wing – the way it would occasionally leave you behind and you'd have to trust that the show would fill you in by the end. It's very rare among TV shows. Justice certainly isn't doing it at a West Wing level, but it's nice to see a show even attempting not to insult the viewer's intelligence. (Although I have a sense if I were a trial lawyer, I'd be pretty insulted. The courtroom antics skew towards a lot of narration and witness-leading, which I'm sure wouldn't fly in real life.) Justice also employs Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" as its theme song. This is pretty cool – but it seems like the sort of thing that wouldn't have happened if Warren were still around.
Ultimately, the show poses some interesting questions about the way high profile cases are tried in the media, and how the tools available to expensive firms (jury research, computerized re-enactments) can turn the tables in favor of wealthy defendants. However, Justice doesn't really answer these questions. Its lawyers aren't trying to fix the media situation; they're just using it to their advantage. One interesting addition is an epilogue flashback, in which we see the death in question and find out if the defendant was actually innocent. It's a great way of illustrating that the trial is the pursuit of truth, but there's no guarantee that it comes anywhere close. Like a scientific experiment, there's only so much evidence available, and you have to hope you've interpreted it correctly. With the epilogue, you just know. I've always wished we could do this with famous historical moments like the Kennedy assassination: go back in time, see what happened, and just know. In this week's episode, the exonerated client's innocence is confirmed, but it stands to reason that sometimes the guilty will go free and sometimes the innocent will be wrongly convicted. Could be interesting. With Garber and all, the show certainly has some potential, but I'm not holding my breath.
Premiering This Week
Standoff: Fox, Tuesday at 9:00 
'Til Death: Fox, Thursday at 8:00
Happy Hour: Fox, Thursday at 8:30
Returning This Week
The Simpsons: Fox, Sunday at 8:00
American Dad: Fox, Sunday at 8:30
Family Guy: Fox, Sunday at 9:00 
© onebee · all rights reserved
Bee Boy — Mon, 9/11/06 10:31am
Watched the second episode of Justice last night – I know, I shouldn't, but... Garber! The writing has completely fallen apart; most of the lines in this episode made absolutely no sense.
The episode clearly underwent a lot of last-minute tinkering, though. More than half of Garber's dialogue was looplines. (Something I rarely notice, but it starts to become obvious when the character is constantly talking from off screen.) I think it would've been wiser to schedule a different episode for airing this week, because anyone trying to get a better sense of the show is now deeply confused.
Joe Mulder — Mon, 9/11/06 1:17pm
I watched an episode of "Justice" (maybe the second one), because, Garber! Almost everything about it was bad, but, still. Garber. And they had Lilly Kane from "Veronica Mars" and Ryan Chappel from "24," so, there's that.
The most annoying part, though, was that every line of dialogue was over-explained for the benefit of the audience, but it was stuff that no lawyer would say because all the other lawyers would already know. So rather than help the audience along, it's actually distracting.
Anyway. The "real" shows start next week, no?
Bee Boy — Mon, 9/11/06 3:38pm
Yes, that was the second one, and yes, it was awful. (Amanda Seyfried: you'll never find her too far from a murder scene.) Generally, Justice doesn't seem to resort to over-explanation (I even remarked about this after the pilot). But you're right; it's all over this episode. I wonder if all those conspicuous revisions came from network requests to dumb it down. It certainly felt like a subplot or twist had been cut out, based on where the strange edits and looplines appeared.
There was one scene with the lawyers having an impromptu debate at the defense table in the courtroom over whether or not they wanted the judge to grant a couple of requests from the deliberating jury. I was dumbfounded by this scene because they were obviously called into court with full knowledge of what the jury wanted – why would they wait to talk about it there? And, as you pointed out, why would they have to detail their rationales to each other? If they can't figure out something simple like the court reporter reading back emotional testimony without the emotion is bad for their client, should they really be partners at such a prestigious firm?
I almost quit watching two or three times. But... Garber.
Yes, thank Christ! In the meantime, perhaps I should found a Clean Flicks-type service for TV. Instead of getting naked boobs and "fuck" edited out of your favorite movies, you could get Justice episodes, pared down to just the Garber moments, or your favorite celebs' Tonight Show appearances with Leno trimmed out.