It wasn’t but a few years ago that David E. Kelley -- incensed that ABC had moved his “The Practice” opposite Fox’s “Joe Millionaire” -- launched into a tirade about how reality TV was going to suck the brain cells from us all, kill scripted television as we know it, lead civilization into the crapper and quite possibly (paraphrasing here) increase war and famine and stuff.
But in the finest American tradition of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Kelley has unearthed another “Apprentice” clone, the proliferation of which is quite frankly beginning to place quite a strain on the catchphrase market. The best that NBC’s “The Law Firm” can do on that front is “The verdict is in.” (Yawn.) All of the other ones, good and bad, seemingly are taken. That’s what Kelley gets for waiting so long to leap into the fray.
While “The Law Firm” is “The Apprentice” in spirit and inspiration, its execution also blends in plenty of “The People’s Court” minus Judge Wapner. In Kelley’s 180-degree plunge into the reality wars, a dozen actual attorneys (for those who find aspiring entrepreneurs far too likable) compete in a faux law firm presided over by “managing partner” Roy Black (himself a big-time trial lawyer). They try real cases culled from the civil rolls in courtrooms fronted by “real retired judges.” The plaintiffs and defendants agree in advance to be bound by the rulings in cases involving things like neighbor disputes, First Amendment issues and dog-on-dog maulings. Whichever lawyer hasn’t yet been dismissed by Black at the end of the show’s eight-week run receives $250,000.
There is nothing inherently annoying about the hour apart from its very existence. It does what it does with slick, formulaic aplomb. The dozen well-scrubbed, avaricious competitors play their roles as willful, cutthroat barristers just fine. Black, who once repped William Kennedy Smith in his notorious rape trial and is handling things for Rush Limbaugh, does his thing with appropriate consequence and conviction, if not a whole lot of charisma. But in the main, “The Law Firm” is as good as any other “Apprentice” wannabe out there and generally pretty interesting in the way it shows our cast of snide prima donna lawyers strategizing, sniping, maneuvering and working hard to look really good while doing it.
Without all of the other format competition, “The Law Firm” could pass as a sharp and personality-driven look inside the machinations of the legal system. But because it’s the umpteenth take on the elimination genre, it’s tough to see this as much more than an earnest retread. Things don’t get off to too promising a start, either, with a couple of lame cases that appear designed more as law school hypotheticals than TV series fodder. One deals with the mauling of a dog by a couple of larger dogs and the question of who should pay the vet bill --except that the attack dogs’ owner has already done so, so it’s all merely about whether he should have or not. In the second, a creepy older man is tried for having pulled over a female motorist whom he believed committed a traffic infraction and impersonating an officer even though he’s actually, uh, the county coroner.
Our dozen legal eagles are split into four teams of three to argue both sides, plotting their arguments. It all builds to verdicts and the invariable pair of dismissals at episode’s end, all set to the kind of consequential music that’s become the stuff of self-parody. For executive producer Kelley, “The Law Firm” isn’t a canny entry into a genre he once reviled so much as a curious dabble that a producer of his caliber doesn’t really need on his resume.