Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 19, 1994 TAG: 9405190117
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GENE SEYMOUR/ NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Certainly I'm not. And I was as habitual a viewer of the show as anyone, even during its lean times. But there are more than a few of us who believe the show, after eight seasons, went on a year longer than it should have. Maybe longer.
The only regret I have is that Eli Levinson (Alan Rosenberg) and Denise Ianello (Debi Mazar) didn't have another year to make their presence truly felt at McKenzie Brackman after moving over from ``Civil Wars.'' (Somebody please find another show for these guys.) As far as I'm concerned, the rest of them can get swallowed up by a 5.6 aftershock.
No, that wasn't a clue to the climax. No one's saying what's going to happen - and not many care, either.
Because series co-creator Steven Bochco has hinted at occasional ``L.A. Law'' TV movies in the future, many issues will be left dangling. Many questions will be left unanswered. The only question I have is how one of the smartest, most stylish dramatic series of the past 10 years ended up as just another prime-time soap, running mostly on gray flannel fumes.
Remember the two-hour pilot from October 1986? I do. It was, flatly, the best ever made. It kicked off with a distraught husband pulling a gun on smarmy Arnie Becker (Corbin Bernsen). Then Chaney, a partner in Becker's law firm, was found dead at his desk. Arnie's reaction: ``I got dibs on his office.'' All this happened before they even ran the credits!
And it never let up. Michael Kuzak (Harry Hamlin) defending a rich man's son charged with raping a woman dying of leukemia (Alfre Woodard at her most transcendent); Chaney's funeral with a special appearance by his transsexual lover; the nebbishy little tax attorney Stuart Markowitz (Michael Tucker) getting brazenly picked up by tall, ravishing associate Ann Kelsey (Jill Eikenberry). The whole film hummed, popped and whirred like a glossy dynamo, alternately goosing and seducing your expectations, dazzling you with its high style and mordant irony.
It's a measure of that first episode's brilliance that it kept most of us coming back week after week, month after month, season after season, looking to see how - or if - the series would top it.
It didn't. Oh, it came close. Especially in the first season when sultry, stiff-backed prosecutor Grace Van Owen (Susan Dey) joined Kuzak in walking the ethical high-wire during the day and in tumbling between the sheets at night. Together they had the kind of sexual chemistry you don't even see on the big screen anymore. Apart, their righteous burning could be hard to take.
In the ``L.A. Law'' universe (as, one suspected, in the Real World), litigators with decent intentions like passionate associate Victor Sifuentes (Jimmy Smits) and avuncular senior partner Leland McKenzie (Richard Dysart) often did questionable things to get the results they wanted. Conversely, carnivorous slimeballs like Becker or fussy martinets like Douglas Brackman (Alan Rachins) sometimes did good in spite of their own flawed personalities.
Hot-button issues like AIDS, race, gender discrimination, the Los Angeles riots, rights of the handicapped were woven effortlessly into the show's legal side - and remained so throughout its run. One of the best stories of this past season involved Stuart's defense of a '60s radical who had come out of hiding to stand trial for helping a black militant convict escape in a bloody shootout. At dinner during the trial, the radical and his wife chided Stuart and Ann for compromising their liberalism with the scut work they did for corporations represented by their firm. It was one of those scenes that unsettled the way ``Law'' rarely did after the first couple seasons.
Indeed, it didn't take long before this hip, black-comic update of ``The Defenders'' began to mutate into ``Knots Landing'' with suits. The ridiculous really overtook the sublime when Sifuentes found himself romantically involved with a glamorous murder suspect (Finola Hughes) in a goopy story line that seemed to have been siphoned from Hughes' soap, ``General Hospital.''
I believe the soap bubbles multiplied after Fisher either jumped or was pushed from the show in the middle of its second season. Some of the show's edginess went with her and was never fully recovered, except in spurts.
There was a period, in fact, when people were ready to write the whole franchise off. Then in the fourth season, Rosalind Shays (Diana Muldaur), the grande dame of barracudas, was added to the firm to do whatever it took to bring in new clients. She proved more saturnine than Becker and Brackman, who, by then, had become less of a martinet and more of a mushbrain. Yet the previously undervalued Muldaur, along with producer David E. Kelley, helped make Shays more vivid in her malevolence than her nicer antagonists like Kelsey, who, along with the other retainers, was becoming a priggish bore.
With Kelley at the helm, the show got its second wind. Shays, C.J. Lamb (Amanda Donohoe) and Zoey Clemmons (Cecil Hoffman) brought new life - and more romantic complexity - to the show.
After Rosalind was disposed of in 1991 with a stunningly gratuitous plunge in an elevator shaft, the remaining three seasons were, to be kind, anti-climactic.
In short, the whole show looked - and felt - played out. Not even Eli and Denise - or, more to the point, ex-``St. Elsewhere'' producer Mark Tinker - could have roused this crew's sagging energy. The addition of Alexandra Powers as a fundamentalist Christian attorney showed some of the old resolve to bum-rush expectations. But the move echoed in a vacuum. Of the long-timers, only Jonathan Rollins (Blair Underwood) displayed more brio and confidence this year than in previous seasons. If he survives the earthquake, that would be OK, too. (Honest, I don't know if that's what's going to happen.)
For the most part, ``L.A. Law'' can be proud of having sustained throughout its rocky run a consistent theme of human nature in conflict with legal imperatives. But it has wrung itself dry. Let Bernsen get his all-but inevitable sitcom. (He'll be good at it.) Let Dysart continue with his pain-reliever ads. Let everybody get on with their lives.
And, for Pete's sake, bring back ``Homicide.'' Soon!
by CNB