TV: Besides Cops, Lawyers and Doctors, What Else Is There?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 24 Comments

I don’t comment too much on pilot pickups because most of them will never see the light of day. (I want the networks to bring back those summer shows where they burned off the pilots they rejected for the upcoming season.) But on a comment thread on another site, I noticed some understandable frustration that most of the drama pilots fall into the usual categories: Doctor show, lawyer show, cop show. CBS in particular has almost completely given up pretending they care about anything else; no more Jerichos or Viva Laughlins, just more cops, more lawyers, and their highest priority is finding a successful medical show. But most networks are heavily oriented towards crime and doctor shows, with the occasional science fiction or period pilot to leaven the mix. NBC may have ordered a “complex, sprawling” epic ambitious pilot from the creator of Syriana, but it’s still a crime show with cops and criminals when you come right down to it.

So, yes, this can be very tiresome. You look for variety on TV, and what you get is mostly a limited range of shows about a limited range of jobs. But I’m a little more sympathetic to the broadcast networks once I try to think out the obvious follow-up question: what kind of jobs are appropriate for a network TV drama? As I’ve said in the past, most TV dramas are really melodramas — it’s very tough, no matter how ambitious you are, to make a continuing series about ordinary life, because the stakes are too low for 13 episodes a season. Bump it up to 22 episodes or more, as on broadcast TV, and it’s even more imperative to have really high stakes. Meaning that slice-of-life dramas are more or less ruled out. They usually can’t sustain a full season.

That being the case, network dramas need melodramatic situations that can spin off a lot of episodes. But here’s where the choices narrow even farther, because there are other things a network drama needs besides melodrama. There needs to be a setup that can bring in new “cases” every week, not only because the network needs something to promote, but because it provides a self-contained element that new viewers can grab onto — and regular viewers can follow as a diversion in case they’re getting bored with the relationships. (Not every successful show is a serial, but most of them offer something new or interesting in that particular week, which often comes from an outside character wandering in with a case.) And they need to be cases that have some kind of high-stakes, even life-or-death component to them.

Which is why doctors, lawyers and cops are such reliable subjects for a TV series. They have jobs that are about life-and-death issues — mostly death — and allow guest characters and new stories to walk in any time. They spin off stories with clear goals: save a life, win the case, catch the crook. And they are about people who deal with outsiders every day (patients, clients, victims), meaning that guest characters can come in and carry some of the emotional load. All of that makes it much easier to write 22 episodes a year and not run out of big, effective story ideas.

One format that used to be on a level with doctor/lawyer/cop, and was actually more popular than those types of shows when weekly TV drama started, is the Western. Same thing applies there — actually, since so many Continue…

It's a small world after all

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 5:50 PM - 5 Comments

I’d normally use the words “delicious” and “irony” to describe this, but Marty kinda ruined them for me the other day:

The lawyer Lu Chan Khuong, the associate and spouse of Marc Bellemare, will become the next president of the Quebec Bar Association May 6… It’s worth noting the president of the bar has a say when it comes to judicial nominations and that the job of president can sometimes lead to an eventual nomination to the judiciary.

Khuong was apparently the only person vying for the job.

[via La clique]

Law society looks after its own

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment

Canada’s law societies regulate the legal profession in the public interest—but the public interest, and that of lawyers, aren’t always the same. This was made glaringly apparent on May 8, when the Court of Appeal of New Brunswick upheld a decision finding that province’s law society deliberately shut a title insurance provider out of the local land title search business. “Members of the law society are not happy with the encroachment on what has traditionally been the work of lawyers,” the trial judge said in his decision back in 2007.

Title insurance, which replaces a lawyer’s certificate of title by insuring a homeowner’s interest in the property, can save consumers time and money. When First Canadian Title Co. (FCTC) came to New Brunswick in 1996, lawyers there no doubt felt threatened: almost half of them practised real property law. In a letter cited in court documents, one law society member complained of the “Yankee ingenuity” of an outside company trying to fill its pockets “with New Brunswickers’ dollars.” (FCTC is a subsidiary of First American Title Co.)

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How to pay for some justice

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Karen Fallis works on the assembly line at the Chrysler plant in Brampton, Ont., bolting on seat belts and “doing the same thing 500 times a day.” A single mother with two kids, her free time—not to mention disposable income—is in short supply. So when Fallis found herself embroiled in a legal dispute with her ex over child support payments, she was relieved that she belonged to the Canadian Auto Workers Union: CAW members have had access to a legal services plan for over 20 years. Just as health insurance covers medical bills, this type of coverage pays for lawyers.

Fallis called up the CAW Legal Services Plan, a law firm where lawyers work directly for individual members, not for the car companies or the union itself, and handle everything from property deals to litigation. (For family law cases like Fallis’s, the plan covers 12 hours of a lawyer’s time; after that, members pay a reduced rate of $110 an hour, about half what the average lawyer charges.) After a legal battle that lasted over a year and eventually went to trial, Fallis came away with a result she was happy with. It wouldn’t have happened, she says, without the coverage. “I just wouldn’t have been able to do it financially. I would have bowed down, and regretted it,” Fallis says. “Money is a huge issue when you’re talking about lawyers.”

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Fighting back with music

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

“I was dreadfully wealthy for a while,” confides John Lefebvre, almost apologetically, from his home. One of his homes. Not the one in Malibu, Calif., which has a whole different vibe. This one is on Saltspring Island, the Gulf island with B.C.’s greatest per-capita population of organic environmentalists, hippies, artists of every sort, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, eccentrics, dreamers and social critics. Perfect, in other words, for the Calgary-born Lefebvre, 57, who is all those things and more.

Lefebvre’s curriculum vitae reads like a train wreck of enthusiasms, except, somehow, he’s kept it on the rails. Where to begin? One could start in 1969 when, as a 17-year-old, he had the misfortune to sell acid to an undercover cop, netting eight months in Bowden Institution, north of Calgary. Or with his role in founding Neteller, a multi-billion-dollar online payment and cash transfer company that ran him afoul of the U.S. Justice Department last year. Or with his latest passion: Psalngs, (pron. songs) his self-financed, 29-song CD—a country-tinged, rock ’n’ roll summation of his life’s experiences. Psalngs is yours for a free download at www.psalngs.com, because, sounding like an unreconstructed hippie, he likes the idea of his music floating free out there. He hopes, he says, to build an audience for a tour later this year. “If you want to make money, go play the music,” he says. “Let the music fill the seats. That’s the business model.”

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The Trouble? All Dem Lawyers

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 8:22 AM - 13 Comments

… every Democratic presidential nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections — except Gore who dropped out of law school to run for Congress — has been a lawyer.

The problem is that lawyers usually do not run companies, defend the country, lead people, build things, grow food or create capital