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THE COURT
ABC; Tuesdays,
10pm
by Lev Ginsburg
March 26th’s debut episode
of THE COURT (ABC) was likely to engage viewers who are
familiar with the practice of law. However, for the rest of its
audience, and probably for some of us who hail from the above-referenced
group, the show’s inclusion of lawyerly jargon often ridiculed
and despised by civilians may prove to be distracting and unwelcome
displays of prime-time dramatic technique.
 Kate
Nolan (Sally Field) has been nominated to join a divided U.S.
Supreme Court. The first episode depicts Nolan trying to make
everyone happy while still retaining a semblance of judicial
impartiality. The show is being set up as a classic small-screen
“fish-out-of-water” vehicle, in which the audience
is going to allow Nolan to be its guide into the murky workings
of the Court and the cases before it.
Sophisticated issues of law,
procedure and policy often make for good first-year law classes,
but I’m not sure what they do for network television, especially
when they’re riddled with language as provocative and accessible
to the average viewer as “gross disproportionality”
and “bench memo.”
I’m looking forward to
gauging audience responses to the show’s fast-talking law
student-cum-reporter Harlan Brandt (Craig Bierko), who’s
positioned himself and his network to expose an event from Nolan’s
past that she’d probably prefer remained concealed. If any
of the show’s viewers have seen THE CONTENDER, they’ll
immediately recognize the first episode’s rather pithy confirmation-related
tensions.
Finally, THE COURT’s
first episode addresses what many Americans must certainly suspect:
as in many other arenas of American life, there’s an “us”
and a “them” on the U.S. Supreme Court. One of Nolan’s
fellow justices explicitly refers to the existence of two “teams”
within the nation’s highest tribunal. In light of what many
perceive to be the partisan installation of the Bush presidency
by the Court after the most recent presidential election, the
interplay of politics and justice is likely to serve as a central
theme of future episodes.
We should affirm THE COURT
as a flawed but still-developing example of the intersection
of law and popular culture, and remand to the producers for additional
episodes.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
Posted April 23, 2002
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