I'll Spend Time With Somebody, Somewhere

 

 

If you’ve been a fan of  TV comedies in the last decade, there is a chance you have seen or watched a production of the Duplass brothers. Mark and Jay Duplass were independent filmmakers and actors who in the last several years have moved almost exclusively to television. You probably recognize them even if you don’t know who they are – loyal fans of The Mindy Project remember them as the obnoxious holistic OB-GYNs who caused her and her colleagues so much angst. More often they act separately than they do together – Jay was most prominent as the troubled Pfefferman son on Transparent and has recently appeared as a widowed professor who gets caught in a viral moment on The Chair. Mark was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for his work on Apple TV’s The Morning Show.

Both brothers, however, are just as prominent for their surreal and often bizarre anthologies they have produced for HBO.  Duplass produced and starred on the far too short lived Togetherness which was a wry comedy dealing with being in your forties Then they executive produced Animals, an absolutely insane animated series which followed animals living lives in a bizarre human world, sometimes and wasteland. And there’s no describing Room 104, their just completed anthology series which had often utterly insane and indescribable situations whose only commonality was that they were set in the title motel room.

Which is why their newest production Somebody Somewhere is bizarre and how normal it really is. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on to be sure, but it’s the weirdness of everyday life.

The series focuses on Sam played by Bridget Everett. Everett is a mostly comic actress, perhaps best known for her work with Amy Schumer, on both her Emmy winning Comedy Central series (always playing herself) and in the movie Trainwreck. She got more exposure in the much beloved Netflix comedy Lady Dynamite and the Emmy nominated Unbelievable. But I’ll be honest I don’t think I knew her true potential until this show.

Sam is a woman in her late forties, living in a small Kansas town. She moved back here a year earlier to take care of her dying mother who has now passed away. She works at a job she truly despises and clearly doesn’t feel like she fits in anywhere. Her sister openly loathes her. When Sam tells her that she came back from New York to take care of Mom, she actually has the nerve to ask: “What have you done for this family lately?”  Shannon, her niece, clearly likes her but her sister loathes this relationship. Sam is subtle about being a lesbian, but her sister who is religious, hates her for it and thinks she’s trying to ‘convert here’.

The only person who reaches out to her is Joel (an unforgettable Jeff Hiller) who used to be her friend in school but who she didn’t realize she was working with until he pointed it out to her. He is more open about his homosexuality and is just as determined to make a place for him and others like them in a community that basically despises them. In the Pilot, he invites Sam to ‘choir practice’ which is essentially a gay club where everybody is allowed to be themselves and let their flag fly. Sam, who loved singing when she was much younger and who has buried it for decades, allows herself a moment of triumph when she performs a show-stopper in the final minutes of the pilot.

Somebody Somewhere bills itself as a ‘coming of middle age story’ which is strangely accurate for a tagline. Sam lives in a world where she has sacrificed everything and is still not accepted. In a scene filled with hurt, her sister and a friend from church approve of her relationship with Joel ‘because he might make a good boyfriend’. For a woman who still has a picture of an ex-lover on her mirror – who she goes to visit in the second episode because there’s almost no one else she can talk to – this is excruciating. Her father clearly has not recovered from the loss of her mother.  Her job is incredibly boring and filled with colleagues who say nothing but religious platitudes. She barely can interact with the people she met at choir practice. Only Joel is there for her, even when she explodes over his dreams.

I can already see the haters out there ragging on this series as another alternative comedy but in a way we need Somebody Somewhere even more than we needed Pose. Considering the horror stories that we still hear all to often from the Bible Belt (and its not a coincidence that this show takes place in the Heartland) we need stories that show LGBTQ+ not fighting in the same way they do on The L Word but engaged in battles that are far subtler and no less vital. It also helps matter that the series has a gentle and polite humor that everybody can love – the sight of Sam coming to visit Joel in his outfit for Zoomba looks like it could become a meme that we actually need.

Somebody Somewhere doesn’t take place in the same universe as Euphoria, one of the shows it follows. It’s grounded, its real, it’s optimistic, it’ funny and its entertaining, none of which I can honestly say Euphoria is.  And it is subtler and gentler in its humor than far too many of the HBO comedies are, even the most brilliant ones – you really can’t see any of the characters being on Veep or Barry.  I don’t think I’ve seen a show, comedy or drama, like this on HBO in a long, long time and I mean that in the best possible way. For that reason alone – as well as the fact that it’s pitching a message I think we can all get behind – you should see Somebody Somewhere and then tell a friend about it.

My score: 4 stars.

For The Defense Concluded: Is the Courtroom Drama Headed In The Wrong Direction Again?

In the era of Peak TV and more specifically that of serialized drama, the courtroom drama is an endangered species. I find this ironic because what may very well be the first broadcast series to try and tell one story from beginning to end on network TV was itself a courtroom drama.

Murder One, developed by Steven Bochco in the fall of 1995, followed Defense Attorney Ted Hoffman (indelibly played by Daniel Benzali) represented disgraced Hollywood actor Neil Avedon (Jason Gedrick) for the charge of raping and murdering fourteen year old Jessica Costello, aka ‘Goldilocks’. The series followed the trial from the crime in itself and just about every single aspect of a trial, from the indictment to the grand jury, from the opening arguments to the closing. Murder One had some of the greatest character actors in the history of television, many of them in what was their most significant roles to that date (Patricia Clarkson, Mary McCormack and as the villainous Richard Cross, Stanley Tucci) It was one of the most ambitious network experiments to that time and was critically acclaimed, if not quite as big a hit as ABC had hoped it would be. When the series returned for Season 2, it was indelibly different as several critical actors (including Benzali himself) had left the series. The show tried to reboot itself with Anthony LaPaglia taking over as lead, and splitting the focus from one crime all season to three. There were still moments of brilliance throughout Season 2 (indeed, the final arc would win an Emmy for character actor Pruitt Taylor Vince as a murderer known as ‘The Street Sweeper’) but by that time the audience had forsaken it and the series was officially dead.

Bochco would try a variation on this format for TNT nearly twenty years later on a series called Murder in the First. Focusing mainly on the work of two detectives (Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson) the series would follow a case in the same arc, albeit a shorter run. The first season in particular was star studded featuring among others Steven Weber, Tom Felton, Richard Schiff and as the defense attorney James Cromwell. The series would be slightly more successful than Murder One lasting three seasons, but it was never the same kind of success for TNT that series like The Closer or Major Crimes were – it was far too serious. Bochco passed away not long after Murder in the First was cancelled.

The courtroom drama has been disappearing from both broadcast and network television after David E. Kelley started to pull away. The most successful drama dealing with defense attorneys of the 2010s was, of course, The Good Wife which spent the majority of its time dealing with a slightly more upper class (but still financially struggling) law firm in Chicago. Many of the stories had the kind of political plots that would plague the worst aspects of later Kelley series like Boston Legal, but unlike Kelley showrunners Robert and Michelle King were far more focused on the legal aspect and using the political parts to try and work over the juries. Closing arguments were rarer than they were for Kelley as the lion’s share of the cases ended up being either settled or many times not in court at all. And many of the attorneys from Alicia (Juliana Margulies) to Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) were always questioning the aspects of what they did. In what may be the most famous storyline, the partners made the decision to represent drug dealer Lamont Bishop’s ‘legitimate businesses’ even though with each successive season they got a clearer and clearer idea how murderous and corrupt Bishop was. There were always ethical questions, but they were always discussed in the back rooms never in the courtroom.

When The Good Wife ended, the Kings would spinoff Baranski’s character into The Good Fight where Diane, having gone bankrupt finds herself going from retirement towards employment at a mostly African-American law firm. This series is far more political than The Good Wife ever was, but if anything is more willing to look at the ethics not just of defense attorneys but of the entire legal system we live in. There are characters who are more openly loud and corrupt that are allowed to work at Diane’s firm – Michael Sheen played a character who was willing to break the law in ways Bobby Donnell and Alan Shore never would have dreamed of and more and more often, there was discussion of whether the old standards of law applied in a world so polarized where the loudest voice mattered more than the ethics of the argument. The Good Fight is one of the most incredible series of the last few years, but because it exists on a streaming service that very few people get, both audiences and the Emmys have ignored. (The latter may just be willfully blind to the Kings particular brand of brilliance; for the lion’s share of The Good Wife’s run, it was inexplicably ignored in the Best Drama category over series with ‘White Male Antiheros’ The Kings reaction to this was to have playing in the background in The Good Wife a series that is essentially a lampoon of these kinds of shows.)

While certain series on the air still deal with the courtroom (most of them Dick Wolf based), they are becoming fewer and far between. One of the last truly original ones came from, of all things, Shondaland and no, I’m not talking about How to Get Away with Murder. For the People was an astonishingly brilliant (and for a Shonda Rhimes series, remarkably chaste) courtroom drama set in the district court in New York. It dealt with the prosecutors’ office (led by Ben Shenkman) and the public defenders office (led by Hope Davis). To be sure, like all Shondaland series, the lion’s share of the characters were played by young attractive actors. (Indeed, one of the prosecutors was played by Rege-Jean Page who after the series would explode on Bridgeton.) But there was just as much emphasis on the older characters, including the lead judge, played by Vondie-Curtis Hall and the bailiff played by the always remarkable Anna Deveare Smith. The relationship between both sides was adversarial but in a friendly way. Davis’ and Shenkman’s character ended up, in indelible Rhimes’ fashion, becoming lovers, but they’d been friends for years before that. (One of their regular functions was to divvy up New York Yankee season tickets every year.) And while there was aggression between the two sides, you never got the impression that neither hated each other. Each side didn’t like the other’s approach to the law, but neither thought that the other was the scum of the earth. It was adversarial, but not in a dysfunctional way. All the characters believed in the law, just not the way it was interpreted.  And while this may seem a little too pure in extent, both sides lived in the world we do – they knew very well just how broken the justice system was.

In all honesty I think a series like For the People is the kind of series that we need for perspective on the law (and no, I’m still not over that they cancelled it after two seasons even though its ratings were basically the same as the purely soapy Murder). In a sense so many of the defense attorneys were young enough to still have some of their ideals with them, and the prosecutors felt the same way. Maybe that’s the reason the series never gelled the way so many Shondaland series do – it was neither soapy nor cynical enough. Why so many people preferred the actions of Annalyse Keating – a defense attorney willing to frame her own clients to protect her colleagues from the crimes they committed – is beyond me in a sense and yet understandable in another. In this era, particularly in the last few years, we know that the judicial system is broken beyond repair. Murder’s cynicism is far more reasonable than the flawed ideals of For the People. (As I mentioned before this may be the reason the current incarnation of Perry Mason is more fitting to the times that the Raymond Burr version was to its era.)

But if society is to get to the point where we stop viewing the defense attorney as helping break the judicial system, we can not have a world where the defense is the reason it doesn’t work. When Law and Order – the series that I mentioned in the first part of this essay as being a huge part of the flawed perception of the defense attorney – returns to television in February, it has promised to take a different view at how society tries cases. And maybe they will. Maybe we have to rely on the people who helped skew our position to reset it.

I have reasons to doubt Wolf and his writers are the right messengers though as this has never been their strength. The last few years have proved it. Chicago Justice, the fourth series in Wolf’s NBC’s Chicago lineup didn’t last a season. Other series he has tried to deal with this process- Trial by Jury and Conviction - died quickly. For the Defense, yet another Law and Order spinoff was announced then cancelled. And in the most recent arc of Law and Order: Organized Crime, a prosecutor who worked with the detectives on SVU and moved to the defense, represented criminal mastermind Jack Wheatley and got him released after the jury hunger. Olivia Benson, who’d been friends with him for years, said she would never speak to him again and could never forgive him.

That is the world that Dick Wolf and so many other showrunners have created involving defense attorneys for more than thirty years. As we’ve heard for decades, ‘the people’ in the criminal justice system are the ones he always been interested in. And it’s that phrase I keep coming back to now: “the people are represented.” The people.

The thing is the criminals and defense attorneys represent the people too – probably on a demographic base far more real than the ones we’ve seen on television. We’ve known for decades that so many of these ‘criminals’ have been mishandled, lied to or otherwise railroaded by ‘the police who investigate crimes’ And that ‘the district attorneys have far more resources and more of inclination to ‘prosecute the offenders’ then listen to their stories with an open mind. The defense attorneys are far more understaffed and have less ability to defend their clients than a prosecutor is. They are just as much ‘the people’ as well and deserve to be regarded with the same respect. But TV series never have. And no matter how much we want society to change, the medium that is in every house in America, probably never will. The world has always been in shades of gray. And no matter how much television changes, the courtroom drama still sees things in black and white.

 

Yes I'll Hang Out With This Single Drunk Female

 

I think I’ve made more than clear over the last two or three years in particular how much I love the cable network Freeform. I already miss like hell The Bold Type, can’t wait for the second season of Cruel Summer and wish I could find more time in my schedule for brilliant spinoffs like grown-ish and Good Trouble.  The lion’s share of these series center on young female protagonists – but they never fit the model of the ones that too much Peak TV designs them for, and the network is usually better for it.

Take the newest comic offering from them: Single Drunk Female. Samantha Fink is fired from her job as a website for clearly drunken behavior, abetted by the fact she assaults her boss trying to ‘protest’. She does thirty days in rehab, gets sober and goes back to live with her mom (oh I’ll get back to that). It’s pretty clear she’s a full blown alcoholic early on (when a former one-night stand tries to talk her, she clearly has no memory of it and there are similar implications that she’s been missing of a lot of appointments because she got drunk) and she celebrates her thirty-day chip by getting wasted, partying and crashing into a former best-friends car.

This is where she hits bottom. Samantha, unfortunately, has no real support system. Her probation officer basically mocks her behavior (her sister inherited a fortune and is ‘grieving). Her new sponsor (Rebecca Henderson) is a brilliant mind, but has little patience for her problems. And don’t even get us started about her mother.

I have always loved Ally Sheedy – yes even when she gave a half incoherent rant five minute speech at the Independent Spirit awards after winning Best Actress for High Art. (YouTube it.) She always seems to play the girl who never quite fit in during her days in the Brat Pack and its not hard to see her character Carol as sort of a Breakfast Club-St. Elmo’s Fire character thirty years later. Our sympathy should be with her – she’s lost her husband to leukemia years ago, her daughter is clearly a problem to her, and you get the feeling she should be moving on with her life when she brings a man home. But Sheedy goes out of her way to play her in such an overbearing fashion that when Samantha says she basically spent her time in therapy blaming her for everything, she might not be exaggerating by much. You get the feeling that Carol doesn’t think she should bare any responsibility for her daughter’s condition specifically when she drinks in front of her and refuses to accept Samantha’s idea that alcoholism is a disease. Watching Sheedy only reminds me how much I’ve missed her over the past twenty years.

We know watching Samantha that it’s going to take a lot of work to dig her out of the hole she’s in, especially she keeps digging deeper. She’s working in a supermarket job she can clearly barely handle. Her former best friend is marrying her former boyfriend and neither can escape here. Even at her own AA meetings, she seems to be suffering from a caste system – her boss at the supermarket won’t even let her sit with her there and Olivia her sponsor, really seems to be regretting she’s helping her. The only person who seems to be completely on her side in James, the man she remembered she had a one night stand with by the end of the pilot and we know a part of really just wants to screw him.

Sofia Black D’Elia is neither endearing drunk or sober. You get the feeling every time Samantha’s in a scene that at least one character wants to either shake or slap her, possibly both. She doesn’t seem to clearly have a picture of what AA is and you get the feeling she is completely unequipped for life in general. And yet somehow D’Elia manages to make her appealing and amusing at the same time. Much of this comes from her situation – she is in a desperate scenario that she has never dealt with and every time she comes a little closer to digging a shovel out, two more go in. (The second episode ends with her getting a paycheck. She’s about to send a picture of it with a nasty comment to her friend’ and then she drops and breaks her phone.) This is funny and very real.

This is the time where I mention that Single Drunk Female is co-produced by Jenni Konner. The same Jenni Konner who helped create the notorious Girls which so many people either loved or loathed. I was among the latter, and I thought her follow-up for HBO Camping was one of the biggest wastes of talent I’ve ever seen gathered on any medium for a very long time. (For wasting Jennifer Garner and David Tennant, she should have been made to listen on a continuous loop to Garner’s tone of voice until she gnaws her own arm off.) And you can sort of see what might have drawn her to the project – its pretty clear Samantha Fink is cut from the same cloth as Lena Dunham’s Hannah and the rest of her ‘friends’. But maybe it’s getting away from HBO; maybe it’s the fact that everybody on the show keeps putting Samantha in her place in a way no one was willing to go for Girls for almost the entire series. Whatever the reason I don’t loathe Samantha the same way I do almost everybody else in a Konner series – I’m actually rooting for her.  I want things to work out with her, even if she may not know how they can. And I want the series, like its title character, to succeed. It’s not quite the gem that so many other Freeform series already are, but like the calendar Samantha uses to keep track of her sobriety, it’s moving in the right direction.

My score: 4 stars.

This is a Good Image for TV to Have: Yes, I'm Finally Reacting to the NAACP Image Awards

 

As much as an awards show junkie as I am, there are some groups that I tend to not so much ignore as avoid. I’ve known for a decade about the NAACP Image Awards for African-American movies, music and TV for over a decade, but I’ve basically spent that same period just feeling it was better not even to look, let alone judge. It’s not just the fact that I feel unqualified based on race; it’s more a fact that I’ve kind of ignored many of TV series that are considered, mainly due to the fact I often had the service that provides them. I’m well aware that Power is one of the most popular franchises in the history of television (you don’t inspire three spin-off series with a fourth on the way if you’re not a genuine cultural phenomena) but I never had Starz as part of my cable package. (I’ve also missed out on Outlander, but having seen one season I don’t regret that.) Contrarily I’ve actually wanted to see Godfather of Harlem – Forest Whitaker as Bumpy Johnson; who wouldn’t? – but my carrier didn’t have Epix until fairly recently. So better safe than sorry. I let it go.

Then this week, I took a glimpse at this year’s Image Nominees for out of curiosity. And kept looking. And… all I can say is, Wow. Well done. No joke. I mean, I’ll be honest, I’ve only heard of about 60 to 70 percent of these series or nominees, but considering that’s generally less than I agree with the Emmys in a good year, that’s kind of impressive. A lot of the series and actors are nominees I would argue for if after years of being beaten down by disappointment by the Emmys and almost every other awards show I had just given up on it ever happening. I’m actually considering going over previous nominations to see if the Images had the sense the Emmys never did to nominate actors from The Wire, Treme and basically every series David Simon or Tom Fontana have done in the past quarter century. Hell, I’ll even check last year’s records to see how much was given to Lovecraft Country.  And I actually want to look at some of these series going forward now. How about that?

Well, why not spread the love and start talking about the nominees?

 

OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES

I’m never going to argue against black-ish or Insecure. I actually wanted to watch Run the World but the first season was over before I got access to Starz: I will now. Harlem at least sounds more interesting than And Just Like That…ever was. No comment on The Upshaws as I haven’t heard of it.

 

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES

I think I’m overjoyed to see EJ Williams here for The Wonder Years already one of the best shows on network television. Anthony Anderson and Don Cheadle I would be surprised if they weren’t here. Is Jay Ellis a lead and not supporting? Whatever he deserves to be here. No problem with Cedric the Entertainer.

 

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES

Issa Rae and Yvonne Orji forever. I will never, never argue with Tracee Ellis Ross. Honestly I was hoping the Emmys would recognize Regina Hall for Black Monday. Loretta Devine for Family Reunion. I only recently heard of the show.

 

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES.

I always dared hope that one day Deon Cole or Laurence Fishburne would get nominated for black-ish by the Emmys. I’ll have to start working backwards to see if they won. Andre Braugher must have won a couple of these prizes by now. Kenan Thompson, no surprise. And honestly I couldn’t really argue about Kendrick Sampson for Insecure.

 

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY

Similarly I’ve hoped that Jenifer Lewis and Marsai Martin would earn nominations for black-ish as well over the years. (Please tell me Yara Shahdi has won something in the past seven years.) Natasha Rothwell is quickly becoming one of favorite actresses and I can see why people love Amanda Seales for Insecure.  Wanda Sykes rules end of story.

 

OUTSTANDING DRAMA SERIES

I guess it’s true: everyone but the Emmys is willing to nominate a CW show. And All-American doesn’t even have superheroes! 9-1-1 – in another era it would have been nominated. Can’t argue with Pose and given the Critics Choice over the years I can understand why Queen Sugar is here. Godfather of Harlem has a following. Little surprised This is Us isn’t here, but it is mostly white.

 

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

Billy Porter and Sterling K. Brown, no surprise. Forest Whitaker, not either. Damon Idris for Snowfall - well at least someone’s recognized it. Will withhold judgment on Queen Sugar.

 

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

First time I’ll call them out. No MJ Rodriguez? And frankly, I’m a little disappointed that Pose is underrepresented. Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.

Angela Bassett would be a contender in and earlier era. Probably Octavia Spencer too. My guess is Queen Latifah would own these awards. Fine with the Queen Sugar nominees, but what about some actual Queens? Just saying.

 

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

Honestly surprised that The Chi has fewer nominations than it does. Otherwise.

Will always love Giancarlo Esposito (man that guy is busy). Guessing this isn’t Joe Morton’s first rodeo here either (how many nominations could he have gotten for Scandal alone?) I’ve always admired Method Man as an actor since Oz and any nominee from any CW show – especially one as independent as All-American is great.

 

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that Shondaland is traditionally well represented her. Chandra Wilson, not a shock. Emmys, this is Susan Kalechi Watson. What are you not seeing that everyone else is? Have heard the raves Mary J. Blige gets for everything especially Ghost and I’m always glad to see Alfre Woodward nominated for anything. (Still... SEE? Seriously?) Again silent on Queen Sugar, but couldn’t you have found room for Dominique Jackson?

 

Will withhold comment on the lion’s share of the TV Movie, Limited Series or Special nominees because I haven’t seen most of them. That said, some highlights.

Thumbs up for the nominations for Aretha and The Underground Railroad. Thank you for giving William Jackson Harper his more than due. Ditto Cynthia Erivo and Courtney B. Vance. And I’m especially impressed with your supporting Actress nominees – Anika Noni Rose earned her laurels for her part in Maid and I truly can not get enough of either Regina Hall or Natasha Rothwell.

 

As for the rest: Glad to see Eris Baker up for This is Us as well as Miles Brown for black-ish.  I still hope EJ Williams wins for Best Youth performance. Desus and Mero can not get nearly enough nominations or awards for my sake, and I really hope they win something. Glad to see Black Lady Sketch Show and The Shop nominated, and really hope that Amber Ruffin wins anything. And Maya Rudolph – maybe not an automatic winner for Best Guest Performance.

I’m not entirely sure I’ll follow this awards show as closely as I have the others on my list, but I’ll definitely want to know who wins. And if the Emmys had any sense at all…who am I kidding? I know they don’t. I’ll just have to start look backwards and see how well the Images have done in the past.

For The Defense Part 2: How David E. Kelley Brought Defense Attorneys on TV Up - And Kind of Tore Them Back Down

 

Hard as may be to fathom for the modern viewer, throughout the 1960s and stretching well into the 1980s, the courtroom drama was practically non-existent. TV series like The Defenders a once highly regarded, now almost forgotten drama with E.G. Marshall and future TV dad Robert Reed playing a father and son in charge of a law firm were outliers. The few times you saw defense attorneys were on police procedurals and they were rarely portrayed as sympathetic.

The ground-breaking Hill Street Blues is one of the first series I’m aware to feature a sympathetic yet hard nosed PD Joyce Draper, memorably portrayed by Veronica Hamel. Draper was unlike almost any female character on TV to that point – she was as cynical as all of the cops on the series and more willing to go toe-to-toe with any of them if she even thought they had violated her client’s rights. The fact that she was sleeping with and eventually married to Captain Frank Furillo didn’t soften her one iota towards anyone on the Hill; if anything, it made her less inclined to treat them sympathetically.

But of course the series that truly did revolutionize how television viewed the courtroom was another Steven Bochco production L.A. Law.  There had never been a series quite like it before, and there have been few since. This was a series that was willing to look at the legal process from every conceivable angle, prosecution and defense, corporate and divorce, even the working of tax litigation. And it had a cast unlike any that had been seen on television featuring actors that dominate the media to this day. The series would win four Emmys for Best Drama the first six years it was on the air and dominate the acting and supporting categories for nearly as long.

The series may been created by Bochco, but it’s beating heart was a former Boston attorney named David E. Kelley who has basically been shaping the media ever since this show. His quirky sense of humor, his ability to take on the issues of the day, and his utter fealty to the judicial process would be a vital part of network television for nearly thirty years.

Perhaps his most vital contribution was the closing argument. My memory doesn’t go back that far, so I honestly can’t say if their had been a series before L.A. Law that dared to have so much of its drama center on the closings. And it was an example of how Kelley worked that he would almost never let his lead characters have the last words – the DA, the plaintiff, the defendant whatever sides Michael Kuzak and Victor Sifuentes were arguing against would always get to have their say. And just as often it would be as convincing, if not more so, then our heroes'. It’s impossible to imagine Law and Order lasting as long as it did without Kelley and the L.A. Law writing staff having laid the groundwork in this series.

Equally important: the heroes didn’t always win - in fact during the third season Mike Kuzak (the incredible Harry Hamlin) would spend much of the season unable to win a case and they didn’t always agree with or even like the clients they were representing. Jimmy Smits’ Victor in particular would often represent clients the more white-collar firm didn’t want him to represent. At the same time, the series was more than willing to go through complicated and often very relevant story arcs. Perhaps the longest arc of all involved Mike’s representation of Earl Williams, an African American professor accused of raping and killing a student. The DA would withhold DNA evidence from the defense, which would lead to Williams being convicted, and then ignore potentially exculpatory evidence which eventually lead to Williams being placed on death row. It would take most of the season for Mike to eventually have the verdict overturned. (In a sign of things to come, the district attorney was not penalized for her actions and went on to appear in other cases in later seasons.)

Halfway through season six Kelley would leave L.A. Law and form his own production company. His first project would premiere on CBS in the fall of 1992. It would be called Picket Fences.

Modesty be damned: before I watched X-Files or Homicide, Picket Fences was the first real quality drama that I ever saw that gave me an idea of the true potential of the medium. Watching at the age of 13 to its cancellation far too soon in the spring of 1996 I though then and still do now that it was one of broadcast television’s greatest achievements. It was certainly one of the most recognized by the Emmys winning Best Drama in 1993 and 1994 and winning multiple acting awards for practically everyone in the cast. I was overjoyed to find Hulu is now rebroadcasting it. Watch it.

Picket Fences was set in the fictional town of Rome, Wisconsin and center on the Brock family: Sheriff Jimmy (Tom Skeritt, who won an Emmy for Best Actor) Doctor Jill (Kathy Baker, who won three for Best Actress) and their three children. Rome was quirkier than Twin Peaks ever was though far less supernatural. Most of the show’s action involved bizarre crimes, weird criminals (Marlee Matlin would have a memorable stint as the ‘Dancing Bandit’, a bank robber who was somehow end up as Mayor) and wonderful courtroom scenes.

At the center of the trials would involved two of the greatest character actors in history playing two of the greatest roles ever written. Fyvush Finkel, who played Defense Attorney Douglas Wambaugh (his 1994 Emmy for Supporting Actor was one of the greatest joys in awards show history) and Ray Walston’s incredibly work as Harry Bone, the town judge (Walston more than earned two Emmys in 1995 and 1996). The series would also feature as the District Attorney a then relatively unknown actor named Don Cheadle.

It’s easy to see the character of Wambaugh as some kind of Jewish cliché but in the hands of Finkel and with Kelley’s brilliant writing he was the epitome of charm. He could raise the most absurd level of defense to sounding legitimate. In a story you can’t imagine any other series doing then or now, during a papal visit to Rome a gay man would shoot his lover. The Pope would witness this event, and Wambaugh insisted on bringing him in to testify. (Its safe to say it wasn’t John Paul II actually in the courtroom.) In his defense Wambaugh would accuse the Pope of being infallible (!) because of the position the Catholic Church had towards gays. Throughout the series Wambaugh would continuously undercut the prosecution by agreeing to the basis of the case and then coming up with a defense that excused it. It didn’t always work, but it was a tribute to Kelley that it never seemed implausible.

Just as important to the show was Walston’s work as Judge Bone. If Wambaugh was the impish voice of reasonable doubt, Bone was the voice of a hard truth and conscience. Frequently after verdicts that he found inexcusable it was not uncommon for Bone to lecture the jury on their flaws.  Judges are supposed to be impartial and Bone was, but there were more than a few miscarriages of it over the series length and it would often be the job of Bone to be the voice of reason. I never thought it ridiculous; in fact I would look forward to Walston’s raspy deliberations week after week. (Walston would be the first of many extraordinary judges that would appear throughout Kelley’s work.)

In 1994 Kelley began work on the hospital drama Chicago Hope the series that unfortunately now has the fate of being recognized as the other Chicago medical drama that premiered the same year as ER. In the fall of 1995, pleading exhaustion Kelley would leave both series. Picket Fences would not survive Kelley’s departure and would be canceled with the year. Chicago Hope would make major changes and run a respectable six seasons.

Kelley wouldn’t be exhausted for long. In 1997 he would return with two very different Boston set legal series: ABC’s The Practice which premiered that March and the controversial and iconic Ally McBeal. It is the former series that I wish to focus on for this article because I believe it may be the most pertinent one to how we view the defense attorney today.

The Practice mostly dealt with an apparently on the border of bankruptcy Boston law-firm (despite the multi-million dollar lawsuits they won every year, they never got better offices) run by defense attorney Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott, who by the way I never mistook for Dermot Mulroney) and his colleagues. From the beginning Donnell and Associates would represent the bottom of the legal food chain when it came to criminals – drug addicts, prostitutes, low-level felons – and those were the clients who paid. On a couple of occasions, they would represent clients so horrible that the judges would insist they be chained to their seat and gagged.

Bobby and his group were always willing to give anybody a defense, even mostly those who didn’t deserve it. But what the series would represent over time is that even though they represented these clients, the methods they used were often contemptible. An early episode featured Eugene Young (Steve Harris) representing an accused rapist by tearing down the victim at cross. He would have severe doubts during the episode, and seem outraged by his behavior – but the episode ended with him doing the exact same thing to another victim.

It wasn’t just they represented the guilty; it was that so many of their clients would be revealed to be repeat offenders after they got them acquitted. In one storyline John Laroquette would play a gay man who would manipulate the police to getting an immunity agreement for testifying – and then cheerfully admit to murdering his lover. That same season, he would kill another lover and get acquitted – when he represented himself. Another storyline involved Lindsey Dole (Kelli Williams) representing an accused serial killer (Michael Emerson) who his psychiatrist believed he was innocent. Turned out he had had faked his insanity and his performance of not being the killer and after his acquittal would kill his psychiatrist. (Both actors would win Emmys, by the way.)

And the cost it was to the firm was immense. In the longest storyline, Dentist George Vogelman (who had briefly dated Eleanor another lawyer at the firm) came to the firm after a one-night stand with a woman’s head in his bag. He proclaimed his innocence Eleanor (Camryn Manheim) would defend him and they would acquit him in part by ‘Plan B’ – accusing the victim’s brother. Afterward, the victim’s family would sue the firm for defamation and it took four more episodes for that to be resolved. Episodes involving George would periodically play out for the remainder of the season until the third season finale when Lindsay would nearly be stabbed to death – and at the final scene, the attacker would be revealed to be George Vogelman who had been guilty of everything he’d been accused of from the start.

The characters on The Practice would live through what could only be considered a constant case of PTSD.  Marriages would fall apart, the friendships binding the firm would become increasingly frayed and in the later seasons, the clients would become more obviously guilty and it would become increasingly hard for the attorneys to even go through the motions of a real defense. Increasingly the firm’s reputation would suffer and more and more often the DA’s office and judges would take increased pleasure in attacking the firm.

I don’t know if this was Kelley’s intention when he started the series, but by the end of The Practice’s run you began to get the feeling that the characters were being punished for representing the worst criminals imaginable. There have been sleazy attorneys on other Kelley series – Richard Fish on Ally McBeal didn’t even hide the fact he only cared about money and Alan Shore (James Spader, who would begin his work on The Practice’s final season) was a brilliant legal mind who was fired from two firms for his methods and at his final firm (on Boston Legal) was regard by the partners with not even veiled contempt. But the longer The Practice stayed on the air, you got the feeling that Kelley was sending the message that if you represent the guilty, you’re not worthy of being among the company of other lawyers.

And considering that The Practice was of the biggest critical and audience hits of the late 1990s/ early 2000s (it won Best Drama in 1998 and 1999, the latter time beating the first seasons of The Sopranos, and won more a dozen awards for its acting particularly in the Guest Actor and Actress category) you kind of wonder if this message permeated the consciousness of the psyche the same way that Law and Order’s did. That attorneys like Bobby Donnell and Alan Shore were contemptible for doing what they did and that to an extent, deserved to suffer for their sins. The prosecution was represented just as much during the series run (mostly by Lara Flynn Boyle) and there would be quite a few prosecutors who would be willing to cut corners in order to get convictions but whatever their abuses were paled in comparison to the agony that the lawyers at Donnell and Associates had to go through with their clientele.

Kelley’s creative ability peaked after The Practice ended. He would write other critical and popular hits – Boston Legal for ABC and the Kathy Bates vehicle Harry’s Law for NBC – but these series would be far more focused on political elements (I have written extensively about this in a previous article, so I won’t repeat myself here) and as a result were far less subtle. He has returned to greater recognition mostly for series like Big Little Lies and Big Sky and limited series like The Undoing. But he hasn’t entirely left his legal roots – one of his less noticed series was the Amazon series Goliath featuring Billy Bob Thornton as an attorney  who takes on corporate giants.

 

I’ll wrap up this series later in the week as I deal with what the defense attorney looks like today and if there are any examples that can give us hope for the future.

For The Defense: How the Portrayal Of Defense Attorneys on TV May Have Skewed Our Views on Criminal Justice. Part 1: Origin Story

 

I was going to follow up on my treatise on Homicide when the wind was knocked out of me last night when I read article about how many of the detective that are mentioned in Simon’s novel (and became the inspiration for characters in so much of his TV work) have become involved in cases that had been served as miscarriages of justice. I will return to Homicide eventually because I still think there’s more of value to right about, but I’m going to shift first and deal with yet another issue that may have led to our perception of justice on television.

It’s an almost universal truth whenever the police procedural moves into the courtroom that the detectives utterly loathe putting their cases in the hands of a jury. (Frank Pembleton makes this case clear in the Pilot of Homicide when Bayliss confronts him about denying a suspect right to counsel before eliciting a confession.) This comes very clear in Homicide the handful of times we meet defense attorneys who are absolutely determined to represent any client and manipulate every technicality in the law in order to get their client off. (Indeed, in the finale a serial killer is set free because his defense attorney says he has been held 181 days without trial. This is how Simon and Fontana end up justifying Bayliss’ murder of him.) This is carried on to an extent in The Wire where every major drug dealer is represented by Levy, who Omar memorably cuts down in court when Levy dares accuses him ‘of praying off the innocents’ (“I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game.” And as anyone who watches Law and Order, Jack McCoy is forever being set upon by defense attorneys who represent either wealthy clients or are misguided idealists representing criminals. In the final season, Mike Cutter actually dares to accuse a representative of The Innocence Project of manipulating a case for a guilty client. In a larger sense, the attorneys on Law and Order can be viewed as ‘originalists’ believing the law has to be interpreted exactly as it was at the writing of the Constitution, while the defense generally looks for ways for it to evolve. The defense is invariably portrayed as the villain.

Why does television view the defense attorney as part of the problem with crime rather than an equal partner in the justice system? It’s a complicated question and part of it may go back further than television itself.

During the era of Hollywood movies, there was a very strict system of justice: the criminal must always be guilty and they must always be punished. Almost inevitably that meant that they died before the final fadeout or if they went to jail, it was to the electric chair or the gas chamber.  This was true during the era of film noir as well; you never see Mary Astor in court for her crimes in The Maltese Falcon and none of Humphrey Bogart’s characters ever testify against the criminal; they generally shoot them dead. I’m relatively certain that there were very few courtroom dramas in the 1930s and 1940s where the criminal was allowed to be found innocent in a court of law. In The Postman Rings Twice, Lana Turner and John Garfield are acquitted of the murder they commit, but by the end of the movie Turner’s dead in an auto crash and Garfield is going to be executed for her murder even though he is innocent of it. That’s how justice works.

In the 1950s we slowly see a progression towards the justice system being flawed. In 12 Angry Men (which was a TV play before it was a movie) Juror Number 8 does make it clear that the man representing the accused is a public defender who has nothing to gain from getting this man set free. I’m relatively sure he is surprised as anybody when the jury comes back with a not guilty verdict. Witness for the Prosecution shows Charles Laughton’s character agreeing to take an apparently guilty man’s case because he believes he is innocent, only to learn after the man is acquitted that he has been manipulated by both his client and the accused wife.

No representative of the courtroom drama would be complete without To Kill a Mockingbird. Everybody considers Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch one of the most heroic ones of all time and The Good Wife actually has a couple of its characters say they decided to become lawyers after seeing it. That said, I’ve never been entirely convinced Atticus was ever as heroic as we portray him .To be sure, he does represent an African-American man accused of rape, a case no one else will touch and one he is sure to lose. It’s how he defends his client that I find questionable. If you read the book, Atticus defends him by accusing the women in question of seducing the accused – in other words, he’s blaming the victim. The fact that the woman in question very well might be lying is beside the point; I have a hard time thinking Atticus would get past the #MeToo movement. A lot of people were upset when Harper Lee wrote Go Tell a Watchmen and portrayed Atticus as a lot more cynical and less heroic than he has been in the book and film. Was it possible she had realized the world was more complicated, was trying to paint a more accurate picture, and the millions of people who wanted to see Atticus as a pure hero didn’t like it?

My personal favorite film version of a defense attorney from the era is James Stewart’s performance as Paul Biegler in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. In a way Stewart’s character is the prototype of so many defense attorneys we would see in film and TV to come. He isn’t in this for some noble cause, and he doesn’t particularly like his client: but he needs the money and publicity the case will bring him.  He explains to his client (Ben Gazzara) the ways he usually gets his clients off, eliminates three of them, and settles on the defense that the killing was excusable. The client, a veteran of the Korean War just learned his wife was raped and shot the accused five times in the chest. The defense he uses (and its clear Stewart barely believes it) is a form of temporary insanity and Stewart’s character tries to use his wife rape as the cause. (These days we would call it nullification.) In the courtroom Stewart is charming and very funny and uses that humor to frustrate the uptight prosecutor. (He has less luck with his second chair, played by a then unknown George C. Scott.) Stewart’s character is in my opinion more realistic than Atticus Finch because he’s not idealistic or heroic: he’s just doing a job.  He drinks heavily, he’s strapped and he knows it, and even if he doesn’t like his client, he’ll give him a real defense. That’s admirable in a realistic way.

So considering that, let’s start looking at the defense attorney on television. From the early days of television the discussion can’t be made without Perry Mason. Mason’s enduring popularity (particularly Raymond Burr’s version) lasting well beyond the length of the series; throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s there were countless TV movies with Burr still getting his clients out of false murder charges. Generations of TV fans probably thought Mason was the model for a defense attorney, even though his clients were always innocent and he never lost a case. His job, assisted by Della Street and Paul Drake, was to prove that the cops were wrong and getting the guilty party to confess on the stands. Now there’s an argument to be made that Mason was a precursor of so many lawyers who would later exonerate guilty clients and help fix a broken justice system. I wouldn’t make that argument though; Burr’s Mason was essentially a private eye without a badge. Maybe millions of people became defense attorneys because of Perry Mason; they were in for a rude awakening when they found out what the real justice system was.

(For the record I think HBO’s remake of Perry Mason set in Depression-era, showing a corrupt justice system at pretty much every level and Mason being as cynical of the justice system then anyone else, is a much better version. And who knows? Maybe every era gets the Perry Mason it needs. 1950s America needed Raymond Burr’s earnest one: this era requires Matthew Rhys’ bitterly contemptuous one.)

Coming to the present moment, the most famous defense attorney on television t now is Saul Goodman, indelibly portrayed by Bob Odenkirk for more than a decade starting on Breaking Bad. Saul is loud, flashy, perfectly able to work the system between the margins, willing to do anything for money, and pretty much a great criminal. He also clearly has a moral compass, is utterly out of his league when it comes to dealing with drug lords like Gus Fring and cold killers like Mike Ehrmantraut, and the further along Walter White becomes on his quest towards Heisenberg, the more rational (and frantic) his advice becomes and the more it is disregarded. Eventually to flee the police, he has to completely change his identity and the last time we see him on Breaking Bad Walter is still ignoring his rational advice.

Saul Goodman story is tragic on Breaking Bad. When we learn his origins on Better Call Saul the extraordinary prequel series, it becomes absolutely heartbreaking. Saul is actually Jimmy McGill, and we’re not entirely surprised to learn he was a criminal con man before we met him. What is shocking is that there was a good man there once. You see it in his interactions with his soulmate Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) who loves him despite – maybe even because – of his flaws. You see in the way he treats his brother Chuck (the incredible Michael McKean) a legendary attorney who has a mental breakdown which he disguises as an allergy to electricity. And throughout the first three seasons, you keep seeing the good man that he is trying to break through. But ultimately that man is buried – because of what Chuck really thinks of him. Jimmy became an attorney to try and earn his brother’s respect and thought that the man who ran his law firm Howard Hanlon (Patrick Fabian) decided not to hire him. At the end of Season 1, we learn that it has been Chuck the whole time who has never respected his brother choice of career and that the worst thing he can think of is “Slipping Jimmy with a law degree!”

(I’ve only recently learn that creator Vince Gilligan had decided at the beginning of the series to have Chuck be Jimmy’s better angel and Howard be his heavy, only to decide halfway through Season 1 that it made more sense for their roles to be reversed. In my opinion, this is almost as brilliant a decision as Gilligan’s one in Season 1 of Breaking Bad not to kill off Jesse Pinkman at the end of that year. Not only does it make Jimmy actions seem practically justified, it makes Howard much more sympathetic not only when his efforts to mend fences with Jimmy are rebuffed, but makes him feel more like someone who has been oppressed by Chuck his entire career and is now unhappy he can’t make things right.)

Saul Goodman’s story will come to an end relatively soon. (AMC says later this year but given the pandemic, Odenkirk’s health issues and Gilligan’s way of ending series, I’m less sure.) But I honestly feel more empathy for him than I have far too many protagonists in the era of Peak TV. Unlike so many bad men, and indeed so many defense attorneys in television, he had a sense of right and wrong and that’s the kind of attorney and character we need.

So now we’ve seen the extremes of the defense attorney from one Golden Age to another. Is there a line that explains how we got there? I think there is, and in the next article I’ll tell you who drew it.

Did We Have Joss Whedon Wrong From The Start?

 

Talking with some people I respect a great deal about pop culture, I mentioned my respect for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They told them they’d recently rewatched it and it didn’t hold up nearly as well.  Now, they’d given different reactions to the series fairly recently so I thought that this may have been more a case of buyer’s remorse.

Yesterday I read an article about Whedon and how he may have had a negative affect on pop culture and that so much of what we considered great about Whedon at the time and until recently wasn’t as great as we thought. This has led me down a train of thought of my own about some reasonable questions I have had about Whedon and his series over the past couple of years as the record of his sexist and racist behavior towards actors on his set over the past decades has become more and more public. And in turn, it has led me to question whether all of the things I once considered exceptional about Whedon’s series – particularly Buffy and Angel – were actually illustrations of the kind of man he is and the narrowness of his creative abilities.

Now to be clear, I still that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still one of the greatest shows of all time. Regardless of all the problems associated with Whedon the incredible performance of the cast – from Sarah Michelle Gellar all the way down to James Marsters and Julie Benz – were incredible. All of these actors were brilliant, and many of them went on to prove their talent in other ventures. And the overall creativity of so many of the episodes such as the silent movie ‘Hush’, the surreal ‘Restless’, the powerful ‘The Body’ and the unforgettable musical episode ‘Once More With Feeling’ – all written by Whedon – were works of that art that can not and should not be erased from the canon of great television. That said I think there’s an excellent chance we misjudged Whedon’s creativity from the get-go in quite a few ways.

Now as anyone who loved Buffy knows, Whedon said he came up with the idea for the movie that the series was based on by wanting to subvert the horror movie cliché of a teenage girl being stalked and killed by a supernatural creature. He said he wanted to create a world where the girl killed the monster. That’s where Buffy Summers came from, and from that world we got a bevy of strong female characters capable of fighting for themselves, standing up in the face of evil and being bad-asses. Perhaps that’s where we got the now clichéd term ‘strong female protagonist’. It’s certainly the reason that Whedon was considered a ‘male feminist’ and was given an award by Meryl Streep as an ally.

But even if you set aside everything we now know about Whedon as a creative force, how he had affairs with many of the actresses working for him and how he treating Charisma Carpenter when she announced her pregnancy to him just prior to Season 4 of Angel, when takes a look – not even a close one; it’s pretty obvious just by a glance – at so many of the female characters in Buffy so many of their arcs dealt with them suffering. And I don’t just mean the traditional arcs of how lousy it is to be a teenager. I mean, they went through the kinds of traumas that, if they were viewed on say, one of the other teen shows that were airing on the WB at the time, we would consider them overwrought.

Let’s start with Buffy in Season 5. Her mother Joyce goes through multiple hospitalizations, and is diagnosed with a brain tumor. It is removed, she begins to recover, and then Buffy comes home to find her dead. She then has to begin becoming the legal guardian of her younger sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) because her father has more or less abandoned them. (He doesn’t even come to their mother’s funeral.) Her ‘normal’ boyfriend Riley leaves her because she doesn’t seem to love him the way she did Angel. In the midst of all of this she is fighting a hell goddess named Glory who wants to find ‘The Key’ (Dawn) and go home, which will destroy the universe.  Despite her best efforts Dawn is abducted and she goes into a fugue state after all the trauma she’s gone through. She is told the only way to stop Glory is to kill Dawn, which she refuses to do. In the process of saving her sister the dimensions are opened and Dawn wants to sacrifice herself to close them. Buffy instead jumps into the portal and dies. At the time, it is considered an act of bravery. I always considered an overwhelmed Buffy committing suicide rather than face reality. (We’ll avoid her resurrection and everything else in Season 6 partly because it’s hated by even the most loyal fans of the series and partly because I’ll be dealing with it soon enough.)

And it wasn’t limited to Buffy. During Season 6 Willow (Allyson Hannigan) slowly becomes more and more addicted to magic. Her girlfriend Tara (Amber Benson) breaks up with her and she sinks deeper into addiction before she seems to come out of it. Just after they reconcile Tara is hit with a stray bullet and dies in Willow’s arms. As a result, Willow goes ‘dark’ , literally skins the man who did it, and becomes so obsessed with revenge that she eventually turns on all of her friends and tries to destroy the world herself. Anya (Emma Caulfield) an ex-vengeance demon who has become Xander’s fiancée is dumped at the altar and becomes a demon again. She has an affair with Spike that is seen by everybody on a video cam. Dawn begins to spiral due to Buffy’s absence and essentially becomes a thief and kleptomaniac.

And less those still dyed-in-the-wool Buffy fans shout out: “But it was Season 6!” these patterns hold up pretty much throughout the entire series. Faith (Eliza Dushku) spends much of Season 3 as being the ‘dark vampire slayer’ and disregarded by ‘The Scoobies’ She eventually works for The Mayor that seasons ‘Big Bad’ and Buffy ends up stabbing her nearly mortally. She comes back and is so filled with self-loathing that she switches bodies with Buffy before she eventually does become redeemed. Harmony, a side character, was such a bitchy teenage girl that doesn’t become a better person until she’s killed and turned into a vampire. (Even then, it takes more than four years.) Perhaps the most obvious case of this is Amy Madison. In one of the earliest episodes of the series, her mother uses witchcraft to switch bodies with her and relive her teenage glory days.  The next time we see Amy; she not only has learned nothing from the experience but has become a full-fledged witch herself. (The writers thought it would be funny to have her turn herself into a rat and keep her in a cage for three years.)

I realize that is part of the nature of television series to have the characters go through traumatic arcs as part of the plot – drama wouldn’t exist without. And to be fair, there were quite a few male characters that went through similar plots in Whedon’s shows – Angel wouldn’t have existed without it. But there seems to be a substantial disconnect between Whedon being a feminist ally and the untold amounts of suffering he inflicted on the women characters in his series. To be clear this wasn’t just Whedon – the entire writing staff was part of the effort and there were quite a few women writers on the show willing to make the characters suffer.

(Incidentally anybody watch UnReal? You know the Lifetime drama that takes place behind the scenes of a reality show where the producers, mostly female, go out of their way to make the contestants on the show suffer for ratings and are given bonuses for it? One of the creators was Marni Noxon. She wrote for Whedon for both Buffy and Angel and wrote some less than subtle scripts about females being abused. Just saying.)

Now I suppose some people could make the argument that so many of the traumas that these character had to go through in their lives was suppose to serve as a counter-balance to the bigger goals of saving the world, which the casts of both series had to do every season. This actually gets me to my second point – I don’t think Whedon ever considered the world worth saving.

In Angel’s Season 2 episode ‘Reprise’ Angel, who’s been in a spiral for weeks, finally decides to go on a mission to the ‘home office’ of Wolfram & Hart, the demonic law firm that was basically the source of all evil. Angel gets on an elevator (I do love the Muzak that plays all the way down) with Holland Manners, an executive Angel left to be murdered in an earlier episode. (“I’m quite dead. Unfortunately my contract lasts well beyond that.” Manners constantly baits Angel as to what he intends to do when he meets the ‘senior partners’. He tells them they’ve always existed in some form and name checks the Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge. Finally, they arrive – and Angel is right back where he started in LA. And he notices all the horrors that are going on that everyone else ignores. The definition is clear: We’ve been in Hell the whole time.

This is one of the darkest visions that any television writer has ever written about mankind – the next show that went this dark was True Detective.  And it almost got completely ignored. Whedon actually would double down on the idea nearly two seasons later. After an epic battle that nearly ended with everybody in the world being a slave, the spirit of Lilah, another Wolfram and Hart employee, comes into Angel’s headquarters… to congratulate them for ‘ending world peace.’ As the senior partners see it – and its pretty clear by now this is Whedon’s vision to – mankind can not survive as an entity unless they completely give over their free will to a completely superior being. (Sound familiar? That’s Loki’s vision for humanity in The Avengers.) In other words all the fighting, all the bloodshed that they have undergone is something that the evil forces of the world wanted were hoping for. As a result Angel and his team are offered ownership of the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart, the entity that they’ve been fighting this whole time. Do they refuse? Are they horrified? Nope, they accept. They all have their reasons, but they accept. They say they’re doing it to try and beat the system from the inside, but by the middle of the final season, they are fundamentally corrupted by being there.

You look very closely at this, and it really makes you wonder what Angel and his friends – and by association, Buffy and the Scoobies – have been fighting for this whole time. (Indeed the fact that one of the things Angel is given is a weapon to help Buffy defeat the great evil she’s been fighting all season drives the point home: the senior partners want the world saved because they want business as usual to continue.) Whedon keeps driving home the fact ‘the fight is all that matters’ – it’s the theme of the final episode. But you get the feeling, as he leads the characters into a battle they will inevitably be killed in, that he doesn’t really believe that.

That’s the thing about Whedon’s work: saving the world is counterproductive. You can actually see in the three major projects he worked on afterward:

Firefly: Takes place nearly five hundred years in the future in outer space. We hear over and over about ‘Earth-That-Was’. Pretty sure that doesn’t mean anything good has happened if they had ever found it.

Dollhouse: A company is erasing the minds of people in order to slowly but surely take over the world. When the series ended abruptly after two seasons, the apocalypse had happened. I’m pretty sure Eliza Dushku didn’t save the world this time.

Cabin in the Woods: Five clichés have to be killed to appease the elder gods or the world ends. One of the ‘victims’ – who has people who love him – decides not to die, because he thinks its time the world be destroyed. The last shot of the movie is of that beginning.

Looking at all of this Whedon looks less like a creative genius and more like a nerd who just wants to write apocalypse fanfic. Now I get why he’d do this – dystopian series are kind of a big deal these days – and I’d honestly rather listen to the dialogue from Buffy then any of the characters on The Walking Dead. But the thing is, at least some of the series involving a dystopia are about our society to an extent. I may loathe The Handmaid’s Tale but I can’t exactly argue that isn’t about themes that don’t exist now. Whedon’s characters may have clever things to say, but all of its about pop culture. There’s nothing deeper to his dialogue than that.

So what’s Whedon’s legacy? I think Buffy gives an idea. In the middle of Season 4, there’s an episode called ‘Superstar’. In this universe, a minor character named Jonathan Levenson (Danny Strong) has somehow become the most important person on Earth. He’s the guy the Scoobies turn to the fight baddies, he’s a movie star, he’s a political a figure – all the women (including lesbians) want to date him and all the men (especially Xander) want to be him. Now this is funny when you learn Jonathan started in The Matrix and invented the Internet, but it’s far less funny when you consider where Buffy herself is.

Detail: Jonathan was a fringe character. His most important moments in Season 3 were ‘Earshot’ where after years of bullying by everybody he’s decided to kill himself before Buffy saves him, and ‘The Prom’ where in one of the great moment in the entire history of the series representing the class, he gives Buffy the award of ‘Class Protector’. In ‘Superstar’, it’s almost casually mentioned that Jonathan has pretty much done everything Buffy did to this point in the series – and that she gave him the Class Protector.  In other words, a nerdy white male has superseded all the heroine’s achievements.

Naturally, there’s a spell involved and when it’s reserved Jonathan goes back to normal and Buffy gently chides about what he did and why everybody was angry at him. Lesson learned, right? The next time we see Jonathan, it’s Season 6 and he and two other far less balance nerds have decided, for no real reason, to take over Sunnydale and destroy Buffy. That Jonathan ultimately repents when he learns he’s in too deep is irrelevant. He’s lived in Sunnydale, he knows how dangerous these things are, and he’s decided nevertheless it’s better to be a ‘Big Bad’.

This may be Whedon’s legacy in pop culture. So many of the actors in the series – including Gellar – never did as well again while Whedon despite flop after flop, directed one of the biggest box office hits of all time and conquered medium after medium. All of his flaws – which people like Charisma Carpenter knew about – were either buried or ignored until recently. But unfortunately, the world is now full of showrunners who are still trying to be Joss Whedon. I’d like to think that Peak TV is strictly about The Americans and Atlanta, but it’s just as much about Game of Thrones and The Boys.  It’s more about sounding clever than actually being clever, pretending to deal with deep issues rather than actually dealing with them. And if that truly is what television becomes as a result of Whedon, well, to paraphrase a remark he had Giles make at the beginning and end of Buffy, ‘Peak TV is doomed.”