Feeling nostalgic, I popped in an old DVD of the first season of LA Law and watched a few episodes from 1986. I was amazed at the simplicity of it, the naivety, the flatness of the characters in a legal drama I used to watch (as an adult) with serious attention. Now it just seems silly to me, especially the top-rank lawyers explaining to each other the basic building blocks of the law, perhaps best exemplified by Arnold Becker informing Douglas Brackman that “the lawyer who defends his own case has a fool for a client” as if this were informative wisdom.
But then I thought: Where did I first get exposed to that truism? Perhaps it was from watching LA Law itself in 1986. Maybe I knew that axiom long before that, but I certainly wasn’t born knowing it. I remember being scared of entering the second grade, in much the same way—the difficult principles I would be taught in second grade (spelling of multi-syllable words, two-digit addition and subtraction, etc.) now seem so elementary and anything but scary. Maybe I should apply the same point to old TV shows: they taught me basics that seemed challenging but now seem like anything but challenging.
But then I wonder why do certain movies from far longer back than 1986 seem as rich, as subtle, as demanding of my mind as they saw the first time I saw them.
That is a lot older than LA Law and even older than TV & Movies. I’ve heard it is based on an old Italian adage. As far as TV goes, believe it or not Bewitched used it in the Benjamin Franklin episode. I would guess it was used often on TV. I could see Perry Mason rolling it out, etc.
For sure. But we all come across some old sayings somewhere.
I’m just not sure if this is a failing of LA LAW, that it indulged in such stuff while attempting to be cutting edge, or just a failing of a younger me not to roll my eyes at it. I’m inclined to think that LA LAW wasn’t as sharp as I’d thought it was in the 1980s.
It was a popular and well received show at the time. I know we’ve had threads here recently about how well or badly works from the past age. But I find that sometimes my own perception of a show can change over the years. As a child I absolutely loved Adam West’s Batman series, thought it was stupid and hokey by the time I was a teen, but now in my 40s I appreciate it for what it was.
What made LA Law great was not its complexity, sophistication or fleshed out characters. It was its devil’s advocacy. The bad guy’s lawyer always made a compelling argument that, although wrong, was never easily refutable.
A never ending psychadelics party is apparently what it was.
I remember the show being cheesy when I was a kid, but when I re-watched it as an adult I realized it wasn’t cheesy so much that everyone that was involved in writing the show and maybe other aspects of production were absolute tripping on something.
Like, it goes beyond hokey, beyond being sort of dumb, straight into “okay no sober person thought this shit up”
Eh. I can’t unequivocally claim that there weren’t drugs in that writers’ room, but I don’t automatically buy into the old “they must have been high” trope whenever I see a weird creative work. Some people can tap into those odd recesses of their imagination without the help of substances. It’s a quality I envy sometimes when I’m trying to be creative.
As for LA Law, I too enjoyed it during its original run. I kind of looked at it more as a nighttime soap opera than a realistic legal drama though. I haven’t re-watched it since, and I suspect this is one of those shows that is best left to memory.
That’s my take, as well. L.A. Law was a show I greatly enjoyed back then, but it was primarily about the characters and their stories, rather than being an accurate depiction of jurisprudence and the practice of law.
And, as has been noted, the “state of the art” in modern dramatic television scriptwriting leans more strongly towards realism than it did back then. To the OP’s example of the quote from Arnold Becker: the scriptwriters were using him to sell that point to the audience (some of whom may not have heard the term before), for the purpose of that episode’s plot, rather than trying to depict a realistic conversation between two experienced lawyers.
Yes. I’ve watched a few more episodes now, and it’s very soap opera-ish. Silly. A lot of expository speeches from unlikely characters. Hard to believe I once bought into this melodramatic crap. I wonder if I’ve changed that much.
Possibly; it’s also a matter of what was on TV back then.
The 1980s were before the era that cable TV networks were producing original programming in large quantities, and TV was still dominated by the big three networks (Fox only became a thing in the latter part of the '80s, and was a quirky, comedy-oriented network at first).
Murder, She Wrote (murder mystery, but we’d call it a “cozy mystery” these days, rather than being very intense and serious)
Moonlighting (romantic comedy/drama/mystery)
Dallas (prime-time soap opera)
Matlock (legal drama, with some comedy mixed in)
L.A. Law
Falcon Crest (prime-time soap opera)
Highway to Heaven (fantasy drama)
Knots Landing (prime-time soap opera)
Miami Vice (crime drama)
Hunter (crime drama)
Also, it’s worth noting that L.A. Law won a lot of Emmys, including several for writing and for outstanding drama series. So, for it’s time, it was considered one of the best shows on TV.
I know that when I have rewatched old TV shows, they never seem to be as good as the first time I watched them - but I think it has less to do with me changing and more to do with TV changing. " Hill Street Blues" doesn’t seem as good today as it did when it was first broadcast - but that’s because how good it seems today is based on a comparison to shows that took what “HSB” did and expanded it . How good it looked then was in comparison to shows like “Charlie’s Angels” and “CHIPS”
A while back I created a thread about cringe-worthy “comic relief” scenes in old-ish TV dramas - and boy did LA Law have a bunch of those in amongst the legal stuff. But back in the day, I remember being enthralled by the show. Who knows how I’ll feel about shows I like now in 20 years time?
It’s really no different now just packaged slicker. Look at the 911 franchise or the Chicago Med/Fire/whatever or any Doctor drama. Full of melodrama and speeches. Not one where people speak like humans.
However I can attest that old tv shows particularly from the 70s and 80s had a lot of melodrama and expository dialogue that modern audiences wouldn’t have patience for. But i don’t know that i would call it bad writing as much as a style of the time.
This thread made me think of The West Wing which is definitely one of my favorite shows of all time. It debuted in 1999 for those unaware. John Spencer played a main character on west wing and was on LA Law as well in the 80s.
I rewatch west wing once every couple of years and the first season has a lot of this kind of stuff. The first episode has Rob Lowe explaining the acronym POTUS. Incredibly obvious, but shows back then assumed the audience knew NOTHING. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. If any new tv shows feel the need to explain how political campaigns work or social security or healthcare costs it’s gonna feel unnecessary. But thats only because west wing explained it first.
Ironically I think newer TV shows have the opposite the problem? How much do you explain to prevent losing the audience? Or do you just go completely melodrama? The Wire for example was brilliant but it lost me when describing city level politics and police procedures.
Wit regard to Batman, Executive Producer William Dozier knew from the start it would be almost impossible to bring the comic book to television in any form bordering on realism, so there was a conscious decision to emphasize the “cartoony” aspects of the show. As a result, the original “tongue-in-cheek” writing was supplanted by High Camp by the middle of the second season.
Subsequent productions of Batman show that it can be done more realistically, but only by emphasizing the darker aspects of the character.
It’s pretty common to claim that anything that shows a lot of imagination proves that the author must have been on psychedelics. In general it’s not true. For instance, it’s claimed that Lewis Carroll must have been using them to write the Alice books, but he didn’t. Some people have a lot of imagination without using any drugs.