It was twenty years ago that CBS premiered the series
Judging Amy (1999). It centered around a female judge, as she sat on family court in Connecticut and dealt with family issues both in her job and in her personal life. She was a divorced, single mother, living with her own parent who was a social worker. Now, twenty years later, CBS has premiered this series, which also centers around a female judge. She doesn't sit on family court in some small state. As a result, it allows this series to tackle bigger, harder and more political issues. In the initial episodes, it eschews the judge's personal life. As such, it's more akin to many of the other CBS procedural shows or even something like NBC's
Law & Order. The difference is that the focus is on the person sitting behind the bench and not the lawyers arguing in front of it. However, creator Greg Spottiswood must realize that an entire series, absent a personal life, of a judge sitting behind a bench can't totally work. Therefore, the female judge might be the center, but swirling very close to that center are other characters who are lawyers that either balance or inject some otherwise excitement. Except, I'm not sure those lawyer characters are all that engaging.
Simone Missick (
Altered Carbon and
Luke Cage) stars as Lola Carmichael, a lawyer who quickly becomes a judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court. She's African-American and points out the lack of African-American judges. She might be what some would call an activist judge. She brings a point-of-view or perspective that the rest probably don't. She's mainly bringing a liberal perspective, as opposed to what feels like an overwhelming conservative perspective. Specifically, what she's fighting against is the perspective that sees judgeship and the courts as a machine that needs to quickly churn through cases as quickly as possible without challenging anything or with much consideration of the defendants who come before them. Lola though wants the opposite. She does want to challenge and she does want to consider the defendants who come before her.
It's just a shame that a great character like her doesn't really feel like a fully-fleshed out person. It is perhaps unfair to compare her to someone like the titular character in
Judging Amy. A better comparison might be to someone in
Law & Order where it's less about the characters being fully-fleshed out and it's more about the cases that we get week-to-week. Unfortunately, I'm not yet endeared to Lola as I was someone like Mariska Hargitay's character in
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Maybe comparing Missick's character to Hargitay's is also unfair, but she just doesn't feel as serious or as down-to-Earth. Her banter on the phone in the beginning of the second episode feels like it was ripped from some silly romantic-comedy rather than the serious legal drama that this is meant to be. Obviously, legal dramas like
The Good Wife utilized comedy and even ridiculous humor, but that series had established its characters and endeared us to them first. This series will probably do so by the end of the first season, but nothing at first is really hooking me.
Wilson Bethel (
Daredevil and
Hart of Dixie) co-stars as Mark Callan, a fellow lawyer who went to the same law school as Lola. However, he remains a prosecutor after Lola's promotion to the bench. He's still friends with her and talks to her all the time. In fact, it seems as if Mark is the only friend that Lola has. It might speak to the lack of diversity in court system, but there would presumably be some other black women with whom she could converse, both inside and outside the court. Mark otherwise is a rather lame and boring character whose cases feel like C or D stories in whatever narrative scheme this show has. His hook is that his father is a criminal and Mark's career as a prosecutor is perhaps in rebellion to his dad. Again, it's lame and boring.
If nothing else, the series is providing a little bit of insight on what judges go through. There's bureaucracy to what judges experience. There's office rivalries and even hierarchies among those in the court. Some of that behind-the-robe stuff is intriguing, but the writers here haven't made it dramatically compelling yet. The week-to-week cases certainly haven't been dramatically compelling yet. I've only seen two episodes, so maybe as the series goes along, they will be so, but I'm likely not to go along to find out.
Rated TV-PG-LV.
Running Time: 1 hr.
Mondays at 9PM on CBS.
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