TV’s Full Docket : Law Shows Are Everywhere on the Tube, With More in Pipeline

Comedy writer-producer Martin Rips and a former UCLA classmate, Westwood attorney Bob Cohen, were having lunch. “I was a young lawyer,” Cohen recalled of the meeting 10 years ago, “and I told him I had a good idea for a show based on looking at the lives, in and out of the office, of lawyers. And I’d call it ‘Beverly Hills Law.’

“And Marty started laughing. He said, ‘Bob, this morning I saw my dentist. He was doing a root canal on me and he told me he had this idea--for a series on dentists!’

“Marty said, ‘Bob, you stay with law. I’ll handle TV.’ ”

Rips may have missed the concept of “L.A. Law,” but he and partner Joseph Staretski hope to jump on TV’s legal bandwagon with “Bearce & Bearce,” a proposed comedy series about three generations of black lawyers.

Do we need another law show? From “L.A. Law” to “Matlock,” from “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” to “Law and Order,” there are enough such series already on our screens to constitute major gridlock--and three more legal dramas open this month.

“Eddie Dodd” debuted on ABC last week, with Treat Williams in the heroic defense attorney role that James Woods played in the “True Believer” feature film. “Shannon’s Deal” returns to NBC at 10 p.m. Saturday, with Jamey Sheridan as the grubby ex-corporate attorney. Then “The Antagonists” checks in Tuesday on CBS, with a prosecutor (played by Lauren Holly) and a defense attorney (David Andrews) pitted each week.

And due in July: “Court TV,” a 24-hour cable channel on law, lawyers and courtroom trials, with former CBS law correspondent Fred Graham as managing editor.

They will join, in addition to the dramas already mentioned, “Equal Justice” and “Gabriel’s Fire” on ABC; “Night Court” and the “Perry Mason” movies on NBC; “Against the Law” on Fox Broadcasting; the “TrialWatch” morning magazine “reality” series on NBC; “Street Legal,” the hit Canadian drama now running Wednesday nights at 9 on KCOP Channel 13; the syndicated “People’s Court,” “Superior Court,” “Divorce Court” and “The Judge,” and the occasional “Rumpole of the Bailey” on PBS.

Why the glut?

Charles Vogel, a Los Angeles trial lawyer who is president of the California Bar Assn., figures the popularity of TV law may be “because the structure of a contest, good and bad, is easily provided in the matrix of a law suit.” And with people more knowledgeable about and conversant with the law, he observed, “It’s no longer the mystery that it once was.”

It’s also cheaper, he joked: “All you need is a couple offices, a courthouse and some shots of Century City.”

Several producers laughed at the suggestion that their legal series are cheaper, but “Rosie O’Neill” executive producer Barney Rosenzweig asserted that cost is a vital factor these days. Among various reasons: “The syndication market (for series resales) for hour dramas has fundamentally collapsed in this country, the networks have not increased the license fees the last three or four years (and) labor is up.”

The fact is that with a law show, he said, you are still dealing with life and death but without the crash costs associated with police series. He cited the “vice” in “Miami Vice”: “It’s the chasing around, the burning of automobiles, the speedboats, the action sequences . . .”--and, he quickly added, as a tribute to Don Johnson’s wardrobe--”the lavender suits!”

Legal dramas have long been a staple of network television, but Dick Wolf, creator and executive producer of “Law and Order,” attributed the current boom to the fact that they offer structure in a world becoming increasingly unstructured.

“I think that’s the reason Westerns were so popular when America was at its peak,” he said. “There were nice, simple solutions--you went out and shot the bad guys. But what’s happened now--as opposed to the nice, neat world of the ‘50s and ‘60s--the world is in total chaos. People switch sides. The Syrians were our sworn enemies a few months ago. If I were looking for some inner meaning, it’s that the world is anxious for a sense of order.”

Boston trial attorney Jack Curtin Jr., president of the American Bar Assn., thinks the appeal of such shows might be profound: “In our society, it’s hard to find groups of people who can actually make a difference in the world--and, more and more, people have become aware of their own lack of power.” Lawyers are one group that can make a difference, he contended.

Not only that, said Cohen, the Westwood litigator, but attorneys also are at the heart of power: “No question, law is all about power; that’s why people--even though they hate lawyers--that’s why they love them.”

He noted the historical context: “In the ‘80s we had a time of tremendous deregulation and greed and, as a result, we have had economic warfare between the Michael Milkens and the Ivan Boeskys and the airline wars and all these others things--and the lawyers have been in there every step of the way.”

David Manson, who co-created (with Michael Butler) Fox’s “Against the Law,” acknowledged the courtroom as “a theatrical arena, so it’s automatically attractive to writers,” but thinks the issues at stake strike a deeper chord in the audience.

“Our sense of good and evil and right and wrong have become very relative,” he said, “and people over the last 10, even 20 years, have been searching for how to act, how to do the right thing. . . . Issues of right and wrong are just no longer as clear, or at least as clear as they appeared to be before the Vietnam War and Watergate. . . . If you sense that your institutions are faulty, then it forces you to look at the individual. That’s why these (shows) tend to be the individual against the larger institution of the law.”

Bill Finkelstein, who served terms as supervising producer on both “L.A. Law” and “Cop Rock,” said that “People in all strata of society are certainly more conversant with what lawyers do. . . . And Watergate, the civil rights movement and a lot of that really elevated lawyers to a certain heroic status.”

Finkelstein, “a recovering attorney” who practiced law in New York City, including some divorce cases, just wrote the pilot for an ABC series about divorce lawyers called “Civil Wars.” “I think in terms of what lawyers give you,” he said, “they are modern-day gunslingers in a realm that more people can identify with than they can with cops and robbers.”

“Equal Justice” executive producer Thomas Carter notes that “If anything, because of the cynicism that has set in in the past 20 years in this country, I think people are ready for the kind of drama we’re doing . . . because they already know the system doesn’t work well.”

Once-practicing lawyer Fred Graham, who joined CBS in 1972 as network TV’s first legal correspondent, takes a more pragmatic view: “Part of the lawyerization of the media, I think, comes from the fact that you have a lot of lawyers squirreled away in important positions and they’re interested in it (the law).” Indeed, several observers noted that many key Hollywood studio, network and agency executives now come from legal, not entertainment, backgrounds.

Law series, said Clyde Phillips, executive producer of the new “Eddie Dodd,” “are the perfect reflection--or the imperfect reflection--of the human condition, (because) whenever an average person gets into extraordinary trouble, the second person he calls, after his spouse, is his lawyer. . . . We all understand their (lawyers’) place in society, and we are generally our most vulnerable with our attorney. We tell them things we don’t even tell our spouses and may not even tell our shrinks.”