6 TV Shows About Young Lawyers (That You’ve Never Heard Of)

TV shows about the legal industry seem to be on the upswing. This morning, NBC announced it had partnered with Conan O’Brien’s Conaco to produce a new legal drama entitled “Justice,” about a Supreme Court justice who leaves the court to start his own law firm.* The New Tork Times’s recent look at the tough situation in which new law school grads find themselves (a situation the authors of this blog know absolutely nothing about) noted the incogruously breezy tone of the new Fox legal dramedy “The Deep End,” a program it ungraciously panned some days later.

*Never mind that this would be the equivalent of the Pope quitting to become a Bible salesman. It’s television, and television doesn’t have to make sense.

In considering these two new shows, we were plagued with deja vu. A little Internet research, including a look at this canonical list of television shows about lawyers, confirmed our suspicion that there have been quite a number of shows about young lawyers, in and out of the company of Supreme Court justices, produced in the past ten years — these shows just don’t seem to last long enough for anyone to get a chance to watch them. We had honestly never seen, or even heard of, any of the following shows, and more’s the pity.

1) “Supreme Courtships” – A 2007 Fox pilot about “the lives of six Supreme Court clerks and the judges they work for.” At least one of the characters,”Holly,” was a “sexy overachiever.” Overachiever? Really? Someone with a job that’s damn near impossible to get is an overachiever. You don’t say. Whether the Supreme Court clerk selection process produces sexy results is another issue entirely, as Supreme Court clerks are the biggest nerds on the planet.

2) “First Monday” – Another show about Supreme Court justices and their clerks, this one perhaps a bit more serious than “Supreme Courtships,” “First Monday” ran for one season in 2002. Dahlia Lithwick’s review in Slate, one of the scant scraps of evidence of this show’s existence, describes it as terrible and involving a lot of shouting.

3) “The Court” – Another 2002 show about, you guessed it, the Supreme Court, with Sally Field as “Justice Kate Nolan,” the court’s swing vote. Dahlia Lithwick’s review in Slate, one of the scant scraps of evidence of this show’s existence, describes it as unrealistically fast-paced but otherwise much more realistic than “First Monday.” It lasted a whopping three episodes.

4) “Century City” – This was a show about a law firm… in the year 2000. Sorry, that would be the year 2030, when lawyers apparently will appear in Space Court on rocket skateboards while eating astronaut ice cream. According to Wikipedia, the lawyers at “Century City”’s science-fictional law firm spent their time doing things like “protecting the rights of a woman who has been virtually raped through nanotechnology; and defending a rock star who refused to alter the laws of human nature to help his band stay on top.” The latter storyline involves a singer in a band who won’t get plastic surgery to stay looking young like his seventy-year-old bandmates, which is rather unrealistic considering that the biggest band in the world in 2010 looks like the cast of Cocoon stumbling out of an H & M.  Television Without Pity gives us recaps of three episodes.

5) “girls club” – Another David E. Kelley product, circa 2002, which starred Gretchen Mol and someone named “Chyler,” whatever that is. “Three ambitious, but naive, young women work together at a prestigious San Francisco law firm and deal with everyday problems including sexist supervisors, stern bosses, back-stabbing co-workers and cheating boyfriends.” Damn those stern bosses! “girls club” (no caps, no apostrophe) lasted two episodes. Carina Chocano at Salon found the show unrealistic, noting that in the first episode, ”Lynne gets Jeannie out of bed in the middle of the night to practice her opening statement on her. Jeannie sleeps with a teddy bear.” If we may be permitted to editorialize: what kind of country do we live in where a show like this gets cancelled?

6) “First Years” was another legal drama set in San Francisco, in which first-year associates “share a fixer-upper house in the Haight-Ashbury district.” In other words, “First Years” was “Full House” with lawyers, or “girls club” without the teddy bears and girls, uh, practicing on each other. Based on a successful British show, “First Years” lasted one season in 2000. We couldn’t even find a picture of the cast. Television Without Pity has recaps of three episodes.