I just saw The Judge on NBC. The case was already dreck, with the usual story of a successful man taking care of “Working Girls” on the side to help theme through college or whatever. He was accused of murder. All of a sudden, at the end, the defense attorney got ESP (or the writers got desparate) and dramatically ripped open a girl’s teddy bear in court. And lo and behold, the evidence needed to exonerate “The Judge” was in it. They confronted the lawyer who really did it, and he committed suicide in front of them, but not before showing them on the desk a meticulously written confession neatly packaged in a professional portfolio.
Oh boy, now I have a new phrase to replace “deux ex machina”: “Rip open the teddy bear.”
What about every episode of Matlock and Murder, She Wrote?
These shows give the murder mystery genre a bad name. I actually like a good murder mystery, but they are pretty hard to find, especially on network TV.
If only these shows could be as well written as, say, the old Scooby Doo cartoons. Then we’d really have something to sink our teeth into…
Wow, capacitor, that sounds like it beats the awful ending to Bonfire of the Vanities that was invented to replace the wild ending in the book. Up to now, that was my top pick. I’m glad I avoided The Judge.
You know, the courtroom strategy used in A Few Good Men can be farily easily summed up:
After a whole film, we still don’t have a case, so our best bet is to antagonize a high-ranking Marine officer into getting on the stand and admitting the very act he covered up, thus incriminating himself and destroying his career.
Brilliant!
I thought the ending of that miniseries that O.J. Simpson was in a few years back was pretty unbelievable. It was obvious that his character killed those people, why did the writer let him off?
I don’t don’t know about worse but one of the most implausible ones was SLEEPERS. This was especially bad because it claimed to be a true story. This has been throughly debunked, at least for elements of the story like the courtroom scene.
Primal Fear
…simply, a wheelbarrow full of shit…