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"Century City"
- A review
by Lev Ginsburg
CBS's new show Century City,
which takes place in 2030, focuses on the practice of a small
Los Angeles law firm called Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero,
in which the managing partner, Hannah Crane (Viola Davis) expects
each lawyer to be a "jack of all trades". As a young
associate often facing similar expectations, I spend more time
in the real Century City than I spend at home. My offices are
in the Century Plaza Towers, which were designed in the early
1970s by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who was also responsible
for the World Trade Center buildings in New York.
Our real Century City was built,
after a 1961 sale of some 260 acres to Alcoa, on land near Beverly
Hills that was once the 20th Century Fox film and television
studio back lot. Since then, professionals have flocked to Century
City's new office spaces to avoid miserable drives on the 10
and 405 freeways to and from their Westside homes.
While CBS' show seems to have
some promise, I am more interested in the producers' visions
of what Century City, and its law firms and lawyers, will be
like in 2030.
First off, those gleaming Yamasaki
towers are still there. The show's website tells us that they
survive the magnitude 7.1 Brentwood Earthquake on January 18,
2007. That makes me feel a bit better about those long elevator
rides up and down the 44 floors of my tower. I wonder if my apartment
will make it through O.K.
There is a futuristic monorail
speeding by what appears to be Roxbury Park, just down the block
from the towers and visible from my office windows. Maybe we'll
be able to ride that to and from work and avoid the traffic caused
by the addition of what looks like fifty buildings to the greater
Century City area.
My tailor and dry cleaner will
be pleased that law firms seem to have done away with the whole
"business casual" thing. All of Crane, Constable's
lawyers dress very nicely, but in rather 2004-looking styles.
I should point out that twenty-six years ago, lawyers in our
very offices were wearing bell-bottoms, brown polyester and huge
plastic glasses.
On the bright side, Hannah
Crane told the attorneys in a client development meeting that
her associates are entitled to have opinions. Sounds pretty good
to me. On the other hand, however, people used to think we'd
all be flying around in hovercrafts by now.
The pilot episode's central
plot element suggests that courts and legislatures in 2030 still
haven't institutionalized the commonsense principle that people,
and not the government, should control what happens to their
own bodies. One can only hope that this dramatic device was employed
only to cause audiences to consider a future without the plain
justice of this concept.
Two other sad realities of
turn of the century life still seem to plague offices in 2030:
(1) unwelcome amorous advances between co-workers and (2) dreadfully
tasteless interior design. Deeply ingrained bad habits die hard.
The pilot also has a great
in-joke for Los Angeles locals: one of the attorneys reveals
that he went clubbing in Thousand Oaks with members of an aging
boy band client. I'm still trying to decide if it's funnier that
there are clubs in Thousand Oaks in 2030 or that the club-goers
include aging members of boy bands.
Lukas Gold (Ioan Gruffudd)
plays an ambitious young lawyer who is the main character of
the episode. During a heated discussion with first-year associate
Lee May Bristol (Kristin Lehman), Gold tells Bristol that "I
was an 'A' student with no other particular talent. That's why
people go to law school."
Oh well. Maybe some things
never change.
CBS, Tuesdays at 9pm ET/PT
Posted April 1, 2004
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