The dearth of legal dramas
And what really happened behind the scenes of “LA Law”
I love a good legal drama. A good paperwork show, you know?
They are a fantasy because the law has never been applied equally, especially if someone is considered the “wrong” kind of person. And who gets to make laws in the first place, especially the kind that codify corruption and discrimination? And what if those in power ignore the law altogether? So I’m not pretending legal dramas don’t come with their own contradictions to reality. Maybe that’s why it’s such a potent genre, though. For a brief moment, you can lose yourself in a world where fair play is considered a legitimate goal and someone in a suit is fighting for the underdog.
It’s been slim pickings both on the TV and film side. The USA Network is back in the originals business with an adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” (which had already been made into a perfectly fine 1997 movie from Francis Ford Coppola starring Matt Damon) but I’m sorry to report: It’s no good.
Neither is “The Lincoln Lawyer” on Netflix (also adapted from a novel, this one by Michael Connelly, and also adapted into a perfectly fine 2011 movie starring Matthew McConaughey). The first season was enjoyably pedestrian but even that moderate level of quality has diminished in successive outings.
The “Matlock” remake on CBS starring Kathy Bates isn’t bad and it follows an old school network schedule, the way these types of shows actually should. (It returns for Season 2 a week from Sunday.)
So we have one series that consistently plays in this sandbox. One!
If we look backwards, there’s “Perry Mason,” a classic of the form that ran from 1957 to 1966. It’s absolutely radical compared to anything made today, with each episode outlining the incompetence of both the police and the prosecution, who are always wrong and can not be trusted. (Perry is exceedingly polite but also firm about exposing their ineptitude and close-mindedness.) It’s free on Tubi.
Maybe you’re in the mood for something like FX’s “Damages” starring a formidably elegant Glenn Close, which premiered in 2007 and offers the pleasures of a soapy thriller rather than the more classic maneuvering of a courtroom drama. (If you canceled your Hulu subscription as a result of Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel suspension, the series is also streaming for free on The CW’s website).
Not long ago, I rewatched “The Practice” from David E. Kelley (which originally ran on ABC from 1997-2004), and it probably best hits that sweet spot between the soapy goings on in the office and the moral and legal dilemmas of their cases.
I haven’t rewatched “LA Law” since its original run — it premiered on NBC in 1986 and ran for eight seasons. The pilot opens with a slick attorney named Arnie Becker (Corbin Bernsen) arriving at the office early in the morning. The place is empty, but he’s already working the phones by 7:30 when an irate client named Dick barges into his office and points a gun at him.
Arnie: “Dick, this is not smart.”
Client: “Oh, don’t ‘Dick’ me! Not after that settlement you rammed down my throat!”
I’m sure the double entendre is unintentional. Or maybe NBC’s Standards & Practices just shrugged. I laughed regardless.
There’s actually an interesting (and incomplete) story about some behind-the-scenes drama that led to a major falling out — “you’re banned from the show” major — between its co-creators, Steven Bochco (the more famous of the two; his resume also includes “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue”) and lawyer-turned-TV writer Terry Louise Fisher.
I’ve wanted to write about this for years, but I was never able to track down Fisher. She died in June at 79, taking her story with her to the grave. Bocho is also gone; he died in 2018.
Here’s what I was able to piece together based on available reporting. Hollywood is nothing if not an industry of both ego management and mismanagement.
Bochco already had a hit with “Hill Street Blues” when they developed the series together.
Fisher’s career began in the Los Angeles DA’s office before she shifted into entertainment law. On the side, she wrote two novels. She ditched her legal career altogether in 1983 and wrote for a few seasons on "Cagney & Lacey.” So not totally green, but also not the established player Bochco was.
“LA Law” takes place at an upscale firm and there’s a good deal of jousting among the partners. Tonally it straddles the line between serious and droll (may I remind you of the “Dick” line?) with a terrific cast that includes Jimmy Smits, Blair Underwood and Jill Eikenberry. Fisher’s understanding of court cases and attorneys was indispensable in this regard. Bochco said as much years later in an interview with the Television Academy:
I knew I wanted to have a writing partner who was a lawyer because I didn’t feel I could grasp the practice of the essence of law on my own.
Again, she was a co-creator of the show, not just a writer or consultant on it.
“LA Law” won the Emmy for best drama series after its first season. Fisher also won for writing. Not only that, Bochco and Fisher had just co-created another show together, the short-lived John Ritter series “Hooperman,” which premiered that season.
In theory, everything was going swimmingly.
All was not going swimmingly.
According to a story than ran in the LA Times in December of 1987 — mere months after those Emmy wins:
Terry Louise Fisher, co-creator and supervising producer of NBC’s “L.A. Law,” has been barred temporarily from active participation in the hit series in the wake of disputes with fellow creator Steven Bochco and 20th Century Fox over the role she will play on the show next season.
… 20th Century Fox Television Productions, confirmed Monday that the company had sent a letter to Fisher dated Dec. 4 requesting that she cease attending story meetings and “discontinue communications with series personnel” during what Katleman called a “cooling off period” aimed at settling the dispute.
A whole-ass letter telling the show’s co-creator to stay away? What the hell happened?
Bocho’s feathers got ruffled.
Those aren’t my words, they’re his.
Fisher was in negotiations for a new contract that would make her executive producer, aka showrunner, for the show’s third season. According to Bochco, both he and the studio were on board with this plan because it would allow him to “play a less active role in the show in order to spend time on a major, multimillion-dollar series development deal he recently signed with ABC.”
Here’s his quote from that story:
“She was the appropriate, logical inheritor of my job, and nothing would have made me happier than to have her take over the job,” he said in an interview. “But then certain things got said (in the contract negotiations) that ruffled people’s feathers. My feathers got ruffled.”
So: We don't know what was said. Maybe she was out of line. Or perceived as out of line, which is not uncommon when folks who aren’t white or male don’t automatically accept the first offer on the table.
What could have ruffled anyone’s feathers to the extent that they banned Fisher from a hit show she co-created?
Here’s more from the LA Times. According to Bochco:
Fisher had demanded both an inappropriately large salary and … had asked that Bochco not be involved with the show next season.
“Inappropriately large salary” is so vague as to be meaningless. By the way, in the same story, she says the salary she had requested was “less than that currently paid to Bochco as executive producer.”
As for Bochco’s future involvement in the show, why shouldn’t she want autonomy? Here’s how she puts it:
“What I had told them (Fox) was that it was my idea of hell to have all of the responsibility and none of the authority,” she said. “If I had all the responsibility, I wanted all of the authority.”
That sounds fair! You could argue that it was impolitic to make the ask explicit. But also: Is that reason enough to ban her from the show? As an outsider looking in, it seems like an extreme — and petty — reaction to a business negotiation.
Bochco said that the disagreement had come as a “complete surprise” to him and that he had not previously had any creative disputes with Fisher. “To my knowledge, Terry and I have not had any conflicts,” he said. “I have always been a real Terry Louise Fisher fan.”
Until she asked for (what he apparently decided was) too much money and power!
Fisher ended up filing a $50 million lawsuit against Fox and Bochco for breach of contract, which was settled two months later. The upshot: She was off the show but things looked promising because she had just signed a three-year TV and movie development deal with Walt Disney Productions.
When the LA Times reported this update, the story noted that Fisher and Bochco “had once discussed producing an episode about a Hollywood TV writing team who split up and take their differences to court. The episode never made it to the screen.” Irony!
If you’re wondering if the Old Boys Club way of business was fueling some, if not all, of this, Fisher felt otherwise and wanted to “squelch speculation that what happened to her was a result of Hollywood sexism; in fact, she noted that ‘LA Law’ is currently looking for another woman producer.”
Another woman producer! Groundbreaking.
Listen, I think this is a weaksauce explanation, but we don’t know what her experience of this was, or really what was said by either party behind closed doors.
But we do know this. Despite her deal with Disney, she didn’t create anything of note after “LA Law.” And yet at the time of the resolution, she sounds so wonderfully confident:
Fisher never allowed herself to worry that her highly publicized fight with the influential Bochco would result in her being blackballed by the TV industry. “Obviously that’s what the other side tries to appeal to (in a legal battle) — that fear,” she said. “But I knew I was talented, and I knew that I could make money for people, so I knew I would always be able to work. I just wasn’t going to give in to that fear.”
I don’t know if she was blackballed.
Or had bad luck.
Or only had one good show in her.
But as a producer in her post-”LA Law” years, she has just three credits on blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shows. She also wrote on a couple of “Cagney & Lacey” TV movies in the 90s. And that’s it. That’s all she wrote.
The story behind the story
I have no doubt this was the topic of intense Hollywood gossip, but publicly so much was left unsaid. We can read between the lines, but I don’t know how accurate that would be. Not without Fisher — or someone else who witnessed what went down — to provide more insight.
We don’t know what Bochco would say either about the dissolution of their working relationship. But this excerpt from a 1988 Rolling Stone profile of him dances around the suggestion that he was difficult (a word Hollywood loves to brand women with; men, not so much):
A year ago, Steve Bochco, the golden boy of prime-time television, was in trouble. Big trouble. He’d been canned from “Hill Street Blues,” a show he had helped invent and had helmed through five seasons on the air, a show that had won twenty-six Emmy Awards and just about every other honor you could name. Bochco was out — purportedly because he had failed to cap production costs but actually for reasons that went far deeper than that, reasons that had much more to do with Bochco himself than any particular set of dollar figures on a balance sheet.
The piece flashes back to a moment before Bochco and Fisher’s irreconcilable differences and notes:
… he’ll spend most of his day plotting future episodes of “L.A. Law”" with Fisher and the series’ half dozen staff writers. Meanwhile, he’ll meet with studio execs and deal with a multitude of problems on the set of the episode being shot. For these chores, Bochco is paid upwards of $1,200 an hour.
If he worked a standard eight-hour day, that would be almost $10,000 a day.
The piece starts off with a weird anecdote, and if you’re inclined to psychoanalyze, well …
Bochco was in his office doing a bit with water-filled condoms, and reporter Mark Christensen captures this exchange between Bochco and his executive assistant, Marilyn Fiebelkorn:
“Boy,” Bochco says finally. “These things are big.”
“I guess,” Ms. Fiebelkorn replies, looking up from her typewriter.
“Marilyn, tell me,” he says. “In your experience — I don’t want to get personal or anything — but in your experience, Marilyn, has anyone you have known, or like known of, has anyone been like, you know, equipped for a condom of this size?”
Ms. Fiebelkorn takes a deep breath. “Actually, from what I’ve known — or should I say known of — I would say that condom is about average.”
Bochco gives her a look.
“Steven,” Ms. Fiebelkorn says, her voice abruptly all sympathy. “That seems big to you? You mean, you’re not … Oh, my.” Her gaze falls to her keyboard. “I’m sorry.”
“Shit,” Bochco says, and strides across the hall and into a bathroom, where he drops the rubber into the sink.
Oh my, indeed.
This is how his colleague David Milch assesses Boscho’s approach to the job in that same story:
Steven was always a very confrontational producer; he was always willing to take a day off to threaten to leave. He would not come in until he got his way. That sort of confrontational carriage only works if you are the irreplaceable man.
Eventually, he wasn’t irreplaceable. At least on “Hill Street Blues.” That didn’t do any longterm damage to his career, though.
Fisher wasn’t irreplaceable either, but to her considerable disadvantage, her career took a different path for reasons we can only speculate.