Series / L.A. Law

"I heard the U.S.S.R. will be open soon
As vacationland for lawyers in love."

—Jackson Browne, "Lawyers in Love"

A legal drama created by Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher and airing on NBC from 1986-1994, about the antics at a fictional Los Angeles law firm, McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak.

The original main characters were:

• Leland McKenzie, founding partner, patriarch of the firm.
• Douglas Brackman, managing partner, son of the founder
• Arnie Becker, divorce lawyer, frequent womanizer
• Ann Kelsey, public attorney, eventually marries Markowitz
• Stuart Markowitz, top tax attorney, eventually marries Kelsey
• Michael Kuzak, litigation specialist, starts relationship with Van Owen
• Grace Van Owen, prosecuting attorney, starts relationship with Kusak
• Roxanne Melman, Becker's devoted secretary
• Victor Sifuentes, associate
• Abby Perkins, law clerk turned associate

(Benny Stulwitz, the office messenger, is not included in this list as he was only credited as a guest in the first season. Associate Jonathan Rollins was introduced in the second season. He continued his role until the end of the series.)

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"L.A. Tropes":

• Aborted Arc: The first half of season 7 builds up some terrible secret that Ben Flicker is getting ready to reveal to Arnie, culminating in the reveal at the end of the 9th episode that Flicker has killed his business partner Eric Schuller and buried him under his ice skating rink. This seems to be setting up a murder trial arc - but by the next episode, we are told that the partner has died during an S&M session gone wrong, the dominatrix responsible is on trial for his death, and the explanation for how and why Flicker ended up stealing and hiding the body with no legal consequences is hand-waved in one sentence of dialogue. Neither the dominatrix character nor the alternate story of Schuller's death has ever been so much as alluded to before this episode, and the jarring swerve happens entirely off screen. Flicker is written off the show in the next episode, never to appear again, and none of the character points brought up during his heavy involvement in the first half of the season are ever resolved.
• Actor Allusion: Daniel Morales often refers to his previous job "in Santa Barbara." Actor A Martinez starred on the soap opera Santa Barbara for ten years prior to joining L.A. Law.
• Amoral Attorney: Jonathan Rollins has his moments, frowned upon as they are by the senior partners, Leland in particular.
  • Tommy Mullaney also had his moments, and Leland wasn't fond of him from the minute he joined the firm. Leland wound up reading the riot act to Tommy and Grace after finding out that Tommy helped Grace's seriously ill friend obtain a kidney on the Black Market. He told them that their actions not only damaged the firm's reputation, but also violated Federal law. He added that this was something he expected of the shady Mullaney, but certainly not something he expected from Grace, and warned them that if something like this happened again, he'd fire both of them.
  • In the final season, Patrick Flanagan is brought on solely to be this character. He's hired despite past incidents of plagiarism, suborning perjury, and backstabbing co-counsel. Immediately after being hired, he conspires with a mother who was offering her 13-year-old daughter to pedophiles as part of a blackmail scheme, and threatens to defame a dentist in order to extort money for a client who had lost in court. Arnie Becker immediately sees through him and raises the alarm to Leland and Douglas, who decide to be willfully blind to what is obviously going on. Once we get to the series endgame episodes, this becomes yet another Season 7/8 plotline that just abruptly ends with no resolution. Flanagan is still shown working at the firm in the series finale, but doesn't do anything in the plot, and he isn't there eight years later in The Movie. Whether he was ever exposed and held accountable is a mystery.
  • Subverted not only by moral crusaders who seem more interested in their concept of justice than the law such as Michael and Grace, but especially by Arnie, who is a hardball lawyer and often a scumbag in his personal life but knows exactly where the line of legal ethics is and is extremely conscientious about staying within it. Arnie seems to know that if he wants to get away with exploiting every possible gray area, he needs to maintain a reputation as someone who never violates clear black-and-white rules.
• Ambiguously Jewish: Arnie Becker is a neurotic attorney with overbearing parents and a German surname. When directly asked if he's Jewish in season 7, he hems and haws for a moment because he's not sure what the client wants to hear, then the scene cuts away before the audience hears his answer.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Roxanne Melman, to Arnie. Later replaced by Sassy Secretary Gwen Taylor.
• Bury Your Gays: In the pilot episode, law partner Chaney dies of a heart attack. Later on in the same episode, it's revealed he was a closeted gay man when his lover shows up at the eulogy.
• Celebrity Paradox: One episode had Dan Castellaneta playing an epileptic theme park employee, whose job was to play Homer Simpson.
• Chick Magnet: Divorce lawyer Arnie Becker.
• Dating Catwoman: After fighting over McKenzie-Brackman and suing each other almost into oblivion, Leland and Rosalind end up... a couple???
• Driven to Suicide: During a trial Judge and former law school professor Adam Biel begins to lose control of his mental facilities. His former student and prosecutor Zoey Clemmons confronts him about this when the lapses become apparent during a trial, and tells him that her duties as a lawyer require her to report these lapses to the government. Zoey believed Judge Biel would realize that he no longer had the capacity to continue as a Judge and would step down, but a gunshot rings out instead inside Biel's chambers.
  • In the first season, Michael's colleague and friend Sid Hershberg, a defense attorney, cracks under the pressure of having to be the mouthpiece for morally questionable people. He's involuntarily committed to a mental hospital after he punches his own client on the witness stand. When he gets out, he takes his own life in a courtroom during the Christmas season, after making an impassioned and tortured closing argument about our worth as human beings.
• Elevator Failure: Rosalind Shays gets the shaft. Literally. The incident itself is often cited as the moment the show lost its mind and the only thing that most people decades later know about L.A. Law. It became notorious among entertainment columnists almost immediately, and was the subject of endless meta references for the rest of the show's run - everything from Rosalind's estate inadvertently sending out Christmas cards inviting people to "drop in," to Rosalind's bust being smashed by another unlikely fall, to characters always checking for the floor before walking into elevators in subsequent episodes.
• Faking the Dead: Dave Meyer, in The Movie, to evade a mail fraud prosecution.
• A Family Affair: Douglas has sexual relationships with his ex-wife's sister and with his father's longtime mistress, who is the mother of his half-brother. Douglas's wife returns the favor by sleeping with both of his half-brothers (at different times).
• Famous for Being First: In Jonathan Rollins' Back Story, he had been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
  • In real-life, the actual first black president of the Harvard Law Review, is someone you've definitely heard of.
• Golf Clubbing: In one episode, Grace prosecutes a golfer for cruelty to animals after he beat a swan to death with his club after it honked and ruined his shot. Later it is revealed that in another incident a toad had croaked to distract the golfer and he then literally teed off on it.
• Hilarity Sues: Some of their cases are ridiculous.
• Hollywood Tourette's: Noah Cowen, a client of the firm, has Tourette's. It causes him to spit, yell out "Whoop!" and "Oh, boy!", and spout out offensive language. In his first appearance, he's suing his employer for firing him on account of his condition. In his second, Douglas and Jonathan are trying to hide his condition from a prospective investor in his new business.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The title of every episode is a bad pun or play on words.
• Idiot Savant: Dave Meyer is incredibly irritating and cannot function socially around anyone besides other junk mail barons. He's also a business genius who has made himself a multimillionaire and (at least during his original time on the show before his antics in Season 7 and The Movie) the only character on the show who demonstrates unwavering honesty and business ethics.
• Incompatible Orientation: C.J and Abby in a Sweep Weeks episode.
• Informed Judaism: The Brackman family and Roxanne are both Jewish by ancestry, but blink at the one or two times it's mentioned and you'll miss it. It doesn't seem to have any presence in their lives at all. The series also has some more full-time Jews like Stuart, as well as plenty of Jews in its parade of one-dimensional stereotype guest characters.
• Instrumental Theme Tune: Mike Post strikes again.
• Intimate Lotion Application: In "Gibbon Take", during a custody battle between a divorced couple, the husband's lawyer attempts to frame the wife as an unfit guardian by showing pictures of her sunbathing topless in her yard as her "lesbian lover" is rubbing sunscreen on her back. The wife explains that's just her roommate and the action is platonic, but the lawyer and the husband think that's an excuse, and push the image that she's a "debauched lesbian".
• Jerkass: Douglas, in the first couple of seasons.
• Job Title: The show is about lawyers in Los Angeles..
• Know Your Vines: Stuart and Ann's camping misadventure. Remember the TP next time.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Around the end of season 7, Leland gives a speech about how it's time for the partners in the firm to stop wasting time on outside ventures and re-focus on practicing law. This is clearly a statement to the audience about unpopular storylines that had been dragging on with no end in sight. Season-long arcs about Arnie's efforts to become a movie producer, Stuart's injuries in the riots, Jonathan's political career, etc. are all unceremoniously abandoned at this point, which coincides with a production hiatus during which William Finkelstein was brought in to retool the show. The attempt to institute a "back to basics," courtroom drama-only approach for the show didn't work, and it was still cancelled after the following season.
• Oddly Small Organization: McKenzie Brackman occupies a whole floor of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper, has a very modern, upscale office, takes in at least eight figures of revenue per year, and is well-known enough to regularly attract high-profile clients. Yet, it never has more than about 10 partner and associate attorneys combined. In the first half of Season 7, the firm has only four attorneys using the staff pool - Stuart is on medical leave, Leland and Douglas are administrators who almost never take on cases, and Arnie refuses to let anyone but Roxanne do paralegal duties for him, out of just 8 total lawyers who work at the firm at all by this point. Just what those dozens of non-attorney employees in the background are doing all day is extremely hard to discern.
• Offscreen Breakup: Season 5 ends with Michael, Victor, and Grace leaving to form their own law firm, and Victor and Grace marrying after Grace becomes pregnant. By the start of season 6, Grace has miscarried, she and Victor have divorced over conflicts caused by his inability to deal with the situation, Grace has returned to McKenzie Brackman, and Victor is a solo practitioner. Michael and his new firm are never mentioned again in the regular run of the series, but we find out in The Movie that a rapist he won an acquittal for killed his next victim, after which he dissolved his firm and quit practicing law.
• Once an Episode: In every single scene taking place in the office, a male voice can be heard in the background chatter saying, "The search was illegal, so..." There are a lot of illegal searches going on in L.A., apparently.
• The Place: The series takes place in Los Angeles. Completely and totally. There isn't a single scene in the entire show that depicts any place further away than Malibu or Orange County (a single scene at the estate in Montecito where Leland retires extends the range of The Movie to 90 miles away from the office). No character who is out of town ever appears except as a voice on the other end of the phone.
• Prenup Blowup: It's complicated. Stuart asks Ann to sign one. She agrees to, reluctantly. But when she signs it, he declares she's proven her love for him and that he doesn't really need the pre-nup, and tears it to pieces. Ann is infuriated, accusing Stuart of being manipulative and testing her love with a cheap ploy. Upon reflection, he admits she was right in the next episode when she turns down the gifts he's been trying to give her in an attempt to make up. She forgives him by the end of the episode and everything's all right again.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Almost constantly, and not just in the realm of thorny questions about legal ethics. Regular characters like Douglas Brackman so often engage in repulsive behavior that it's not clear if the audience was ever intended to root for them at all. The very first story arc of the show depicts the courtship of Michael and Grace in such a way that Michael seems like an obsessed stalker and Grace seems like a flighty emotional child. He gets better over the course of the show, she remains that way the whole time. Everyone at the firm also champions Benny's independence and suitability to do things like vote, get married, and adopt a child even after the fifth or sixth time that he has a violent breakdown and ends up in jail.
  • Abby Perkins's recurring feuds with firm leadership seem to be based on nothing more than her being a main character who is entitled to advance based on that status. In season 3, she is so upset at not being considered for partner that she leaves to form a solo practice. At this point she's been an attorney for around four years, doesn't bring in any significant new business, and spent a good deal of that time either on leave or working on her own legal problems. There's no law firm in the world that would consider someone for partner under those circumstances. After eventually returning to the firm, she is offered a partnership in season 5, but the character leaves the show as part of the larger storyline involving Michael Kuzak's messy breakup with the firm. The next time we hear of Abby is eleven years later, in The Movie, when she revels in being able to represent Arnie's wife in a suit that will allow her to turn the firm's financial records upside down. Exactly why she's so set on vengeance against McKenzie Brackman is never really explained.
• Put on a Bus: Many, but especially Michael and Victor. Counting the reunion movie, The Bus Came Back for both, in addition to Victor's two guest appearances in season 6. Zig-zagged with Grace van Owen: She was put on the bus at the end of season five with Michael and Victor. She returned at the beginning of season six and left again at the end of the season (In reality, the network negotiated with Susan Dey between seasons five and six and convinced her to return for one more season.) And then she returned for the reunion movie.
  • Roxanne disappears without warning between seasons 7 and 8, returning for one guest appearance, and is then back in her job for The Movie. It's reasonable to assume that she's on maternity leave during season 8, but this is never discussed - and she's gone for at least a full year of in-universe time, whcih requires some plausible, but never actually articulated, explanations for why this would be allowed.
• Retool: Unusually for a successful show, there were six distinct creative eras in just eight seasons. The show was overseen by:
  • Show creator Steven Bochco for the first three seasons that defined its original popularity
  • David E. Kelley for seasons 4&5 aka the Rosalind Shays years ending with her literal, and the show's metaphorical, descent into cartoon wackiness and the departure of several original cast members
  • Former China Beach producer Patricia Green and Doogie Howser, M.D. creator Rick Wallace for the first half of season 6
  • A returned Bochco in an attempt to salvage the show after season 6 proved unpopular
  • St. Elsewhere creative team John Tinker and John Masius for the first half of season 7, which alienated viewers even worse than season 6
  • Bochco disciple and season 1-3 writer William Finkelstein for the rest of season 7 and season 8, which attempted to both bring the show back to its original tone and essentially merge its characters with the cast of Finkelstein's cancelled ABC drama Civil Wars. By this point, Jill Eikenberry and Blair Underwood were the only cast members from the original Bochco seasons left whose characters actually tried cases in court on a regular basis, so the edict to return the show to a courtroom drama and cut irrelevant storylines also meant a lot of focus on new characters that longtime viewers didn't care about.
• Revolving Door Casting: Over an eight-season run, the show managed to accumulate numerous characters, several of which didn't make it past a year. At the end of the series, half of the original ten cast members were gone, and the remaining cast included of actors introduced in later seasons.
• Ripped from the Headlines
• Running Gag: Arnie Becker can't keep his pecker in his pants, and as a divorce lawyer he has lots of clients he can service, not only by getting them excellent settlements from their former husbands, but by bedding them as well.
• Sex God: The inventor of the "Venus butterfly".
• Shrine to Self: Six episodes after Rosalind's death and Diana Muldaur's exit from the series, Leland visits her home for the reading of her will. He encounters and fondles a disturbingly realistic jade bust of herself that Rosalind commissioned as decor. Leland later appropriates the bust for his office, where it is smashed by a naked Arnold Becker falling on it as he attempts to have sexual intercourse with Roxanne inside the drop ceiling. Unsurprisingly, this sequence of absurdities is widely regarded as part of the arc where the series jumped the shark.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Daniel Morales for Victor Sifuentes, at least when he gets a storyline dealing with Hispanic issues. Otherwise, Daniel seems to come from an upper middle class background and has a resume of prestigious schools and partnerships in upscale Bay Area and Santa Barbara law firms. Victor worked his way up from a poor family in East L.A. through public colleges and was recruited to McKenzie Brackman out of the public defender's office.
• Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss: Abby and C.J. One of the first on US prime-time television.
• Talking the Monster to Death: When confronted with a smarmy con man who bilked seniors out of their life savings and will declare bankruptcy if he loses, what does Jonathan do? He brutally cross-examines the man for hours, causing him to have a fatal heart attack, and when the EMT's are (unsuccessfully) trying to resuscitate the huckster, talks the judge into attaching his life insurance to any judgment.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: In the Season 2 episode “Beauty and Obese,” Jonathan “disses” the other lawyers in the firm on a TV talk show, so they get him back by using a client’s proprietary hologram technology to convince him he’s seeing a “ghost” in the office after hours. He gets them back by appearing on the talk show again and dishing out even more vicious dirt. The partners are horrified, then steaming mad—until Jonathan reveals it’s not a real talk show appearance, but a video he made to trick them.
• Team Killer: Stuart is so upset on how another paintball player is cheating - he's continuing to play after he was shot and had to forfeit his chip - that Stuart begins shooting him multiple times. Brackman tells Stuart, who is one of his teammates, to knock it off, he's proven his point, but Stuart keeps shooting the guy, so finally Brackman shoots Stuart, then says, "Give me your chip."
• The Reveal: Subverted. Unlike in later David E. Kelley and Steven Bochco shows such as The Practice, Boston Legal, and Murder in the First, in which the audience almost always learns who really committed the crime at the end of the episode even if the characters don't, on L.A. Law nearly every murder trial leaves the question of the defendant's actual guilt unresolved. Nothing is ever shown on screen outside the presence of a viewpoint character from the main cast who notices it.
• Time Skip: The series really wanted to address the April 1992 Los Angeles riots, even though its 1991-1992 season had already finished filming by the time they happened. The first episode in the fall 1992 season was set in April and incorporated both a "things sure have changed around here lately" discussion to account for between-season cast changes and a riot storyline. The second episode skipped to October and showed the effects on the characters six months later, and itself spanned several weeks of the fall election campaign, ending on Election Day in November.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Stuart Markowitz and Ann Kelsey quickly became a couple, and eventually married. Stuart was short and chubby with average looks and a low-self esteem, while Ann was tall, svelte, attractive, and highly confident. Note that there is only a three-inch height difference between the actors in real life; the contrast is played up for dramatic effect on the show, by placing Jill Eikenberry in heels and by the performers accentuating their differences in fashion style and body posture.
  • This is both a fictional example, and a real one, as Stuart and Anne's respective actors, Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry, have been married since 1973 (13 years before the series began).
• Toad Licking: The client in one episode was a retired man whose nursing home wouldn't let him have alcohol on the premises, so he acquired a hallucinogenic toad.
• Transplant: In Season 8, Eli Levinson and his secretary Denise Iannello from Civil Wars' become part of the main L.A. Law cast, and encounter a parade of cameo appearances by other characters from that show. Not surprising, since series creator William M. Finklestein later served as executive producer of L.A. Law during its final season and Steven Bochco was also involved with producing both shows. Particularly in episodes 7 and 8, there is an almost comically prolonged sequence of "who is that" appearances by characters from Civil Wars, who do little more than walk into the scene to show that they exist. Apparently, no one asked whether it made sense to fill L.A. Law with plot-free pandering to fans of a show from another network that had been cancelled for low ratings. This was one of many confusing decisions that led to season 8 being L.A. Law's last.
• Truth in Television: Larry Drake's portrayal of the mentally disabled but dignified office assistant Benny Stulwitz won the actor several major awards, both in television and from advocacy groups.
• Very Special Episode: Season 7's premier, L.A. Lawless, which not only took place during the 1992 L.A. Riots, but was set a whole six months before the second episode (the premier proper). This was highly unusual for a series where most stories were 3 to 4 episode arcs, with episodes taking place only hours or days apart.
• Wham Episode: About half of the episodes in season five qualify. Actor's contracts were up at the end of the season, and so many of them (Harry Hamlin, Michele Greene, Jimmy Smits, et al.) decided to leave the series. They were written out by having several of the characters leave to start their own firm. Lawsuits and major drama ensued. Note that this was also the season where Rosalind Shays returned, hit the firm with a lawsuit, was discovered to be having an affair with Leland, and was memorably written out.

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