Bumping this thread because my friend got me hooked on this silly show, and I was searching to see how plausible the premise was. Now I just want to add my 2 cents
I’m only halfway through the 2nd season, so forgive me if they’ve addressed this, but so far they’ve never said that he didn’t pass the bar exam in his own name. I’m taking that to mean that at some point, he passed the test as Mike Ross, and at least has that under his belt.
What annoys me is that at the end of season 1, Jessica discovers the lie because she can’t find any trace of Mike attending “any college anywhere.” So he doesn’t have so much as an undergraduate degree! The show should have given him that much at least, and perhaps had him do a couple years at a crappy law school in the midwest.
I don’t know how the show can drop the fake lawyer thing now, since it’s such a huge lie. If the lie were smaller, and if he hadn’t represented clients in court, they could end season 2 (which resumes in January, AFAIK) with a semi-public outing within the firm. As long as he hadn’t done anything criminal up to that point, they could then send Mike to Harvard Law School over the show’s hiatus and have him come back to the firm in season 3 as a first-year association (again) with a tarnished reputation. Plenty of opportunity for storylines and drama that way.
Hell, they could do an entire season of him attending Harvard Law while moonlighting as an associate. College coeds and Mike mouthing off to professors, what’s not to love!? But it’s much to late for that now, especially after the hacking incident.
I think some of the stuff at the beginning of the series with Mike not knowing how to do basic paperwork was interesting, but the show seems to have dropped all of that in favor of making clever movie references. I guess I just wish there was some way they could resurrect the premise and build on it, but I feel at this point they’ve back themselves into a corner and are just going to spend several seasons ignoring the elephant in the room.
As I recall, Jessica couldn’t find evidence of Mike ever GRADUATING college, not attending. The explicit backstory is that he began college on scholarship, lost his scholarship because of an ethical violation, and couldn’t afford to continue without it. (Which doesn’t make complete sense–with his brains you’d think he could find another way to pay–but I think it’s consistent with this character that he wouldn’t have wanted to take a “demeaning” job like, say, Elder Brother the Rhymer, now an absurdly successful engineer.)
