Review for LA Law: Season 6

Introduction

I approach season 6 of LA Law with no little trepidation. Placing the first disc into the player presents on the surface a show that bears little resemblance to that which we saw at the end of season 5, as the cast changes most drastically for this season. Those changes did seem imminent at the end of the previous collection, with a story that revealed acrimonious divisions in the boardroom of McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney, Kuzak & Becker, and the departure of at least one main character was confirmed. But the start of the sixth season still comes as a shock, with the characters of Abby Perkins and Victor Sifuentes joining Michael Kuzak in vanishing off the screen, and in the case of two of them, we get a burst of exposition and plot development at the start of the first episode indicating more interesting drama happening off screen than actually happened on screen during season 5, which also leaves the Grace van Owen character in an awkward position. I get the feeling that a little bit of collective bargaining during contract negotiations on the part of the actors fell awry with the studio. The result at the start of season 6 looks like a cull took place, leaving some big gaps to fill in the cast roster. And into one of those gaps enters the considerable presence of one Susan Bloom, a character I had no appreciation for the first time around. Maybe this second time watching these episodes will prove more enjoyable.


LA Law follows the trials and tribulations of a firm of lawyers, McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney & Becker. The cases that they pursue vary from the meaningful to the trivial, the personal to the whimsical, covering all aspect of law from criminal to civil, divorce to tax, corporate to entertainment. They have a diverse portfolio of lawyers in their ranks, ranging from the eager and idealistic defenders of justice, to the cynical mercenaries, and of course the occasional lawyer that has harassed clients quoting from Shakespeare. These varied personalities don’t always get along in the boardroom, but they’re always sure to make an impact in the courtroom!


Season 6 of LA Law is presented by Revelation Films across 6 discs totalling 22 episodes, and in this season, it’s all change for the lawyers of the firm, as Abby, Victor and Michael have left, and during the hiatus, Grace and Victor’s marriage broke down over a miscarriage. But with the new season of the show comes some new blood, in the form of associate Bill Castoverdi. But with the firm on shaky financial footing, Douglas convinces Leland that it would help to share office space with a colourful Hollywood lawyer, and that just happens to be the obnoxious and brazen Susan Bloom, and with her comes the controversial litigator Frank Kittridge. The firm will never be the same again...


22 episodes of LA Law Season 6 are presented across 6 discs from Revelation Films.

Disc 1
1. Something Old, Something Nude
2. TV or Not TV
3. Do the Spike Thing
4. Spleen It to Me, Lucy

Disc 2
5. Monkey on my Back Lot
6. Badfellas
7. Lose the Boss
8. The Nut Before Christmas

Disc 3
9. Guess Who’s Coming to Murder?
10. Back to the Suture
11. All About Sleaze
12. I’m Ready For My Close-up, Mr Markowitz


Disc 4
13. Steal it Again, Sam
14. Diet, Diet, My Darling
15. Great Balls Afire
16. From Here To Paternity

Disc 5
17. P.S. Your Shrink is Dead
18. Love in Bloom
19. Silence of the Lambskins
20. Beauty and the Breast

Disc 6
21. Double Breasted Suit
22. Say Goodnight, Gracie

Picture

LA Law Season 6 gets a similar 4:3 transfer to the previous season. It’s an NTSC-PAL conversion, from the video tape era of US television, but the image is clear enough throughout, without any obvious flaw, artefact or glitch. You get to see all those shiny power suits in all their designer label glory.

Sound

LA Law Season 6 gets a DD 2.0 audio track, which I believe has a smidge of stereo to it. The important thing is that the dialogue is clear throughout, which mitigates the lack of subtitles a little. There were a couple of sound sync problems in single scenes in episode 10, 25 minutes in, 14 minutes into episode 14, and 15 minutes into episode 22. I noted that pausing the disc and resuming apparently fixed the issue for me; otherwise the sync would be ever so slightly out till the end of that particular scene. This leads me to believe that it’s a player incompatibility issue with my Sony player.

Extras

Unlike the previous season, there are no extras with this collection. LA Law Season 6 presents its content with animated menu screens, easy to navigate. This time I got another look at the packaging, and just like the Season 1 collection, you get six discs in an Amaray style brick, twice the width of the usual Amaray. You get two discs overlapping at the front of the case, two discs overlapping at the rear, and two discs overlapping on one face of a central hinged panel. The interior sleeve art comprises the LA Law logo against a night time cityscape, and the whole package comes wrapped in an o-ring card sleeve that repeats the cover art and blurb, but has the LA Law logo embossed on the front.

Conclusion

It is all change for Season 6 of LA Law, and from this point forward it seems that change will be the one constant for the show. In this season most notably, continuity, and the ensemble feel of the cast take a major downwards tumble. I’ll admit straight off that I miss Michael Kuzak, Victor Sifuentes, and Abby Perkins. They were well-rounded and well written characters and their story arcs developed naturally, something that was true for the rest of the cast as well. With this sixth season, they leave some pretty big shoes to fill, and unfortunately the producers filled them with broad archetypes (and one non-entity) for quick impact, and failed to really develop beyond that. There’s also a tendency at times too for the original cast to again fall back on their key character traits, and are inadequately developed further here. With them at least you have five seasons or so of back-story to fill in the blanks, so it’s less of a problem, but there is a lot less in the way of growth here.


Those new characters are weak indeed. The whole point of Susan Bloom is that she’s loud and obnoxious, but that’s really all we get with her. She’s the large rock that gets thrown into a pond to cause a splash. The ripples are interesting, the rock, not so much. She’s almost the comic relief, and there’s nothing of substance in her arc. She brings Frank Kittridge onto the premises, a litigator who fits the slimy lawyer stereotype perfectly. This shouldn’t be bad, as when we first met Arnie Becker and Douglas Brackman, they too could be seen in such a vapid light. But their characters developed and revealed complexity. To the writers’ credit they start to do something similar with Frank Kittridge, and there is enough of interest in the character to warrant further development, but by the end of the season they’ve given up and thrown him back into the slime. Then there is Bill Castoverdi, a character who makes no impact at all on the screen until the episode where his character is written out. He’s replaced mid-season by Alex de Palma, almost an identikit character except for a more of a ‘rage against the world’ arrogance which at least makes him interesting to watch, and more useful for the other characters to interact with.


Except that there is not a lot of interacting going on here in Season 6 of LA Law. Reading between the lines, I’d guess that this season is when contracts were renewed, and the programme must have taken a budget cut, and actors were paid by appearance and not for the whole season. Characters will be prominent for a couple of episodes, and then will vanish for two or three episodes on the trot. Even the communal get together at the start of each episode around the boardroom table looks a little vacant. You’d expect the focus on character to shift depending on who is prosecuting which case, but the background office soap opera seems somewhat depleted in comparison to previous seasons. And with this stop-start approach to storytelling, there’s no continuity to appreciate, you can’t really invest in a character arc if it is summarily dropped as soon as the major narrative juices have been drained. For instance, Tommy Mullaney shoots an intruder at his ex-wife’s place, and the circumstances cause him to question his motives. We get an episode or two of aftermath, some abrupt behaviour, a quick decent into alcoholism, but the last we see of that arc is him stepping into a confessional. A few episodes later when the character once again comes into prominence it’s all been forgotten. It’s hard to invest in a character arc if it is given such short shrift.


That’s the feeling I get with this whole season of LA Law. Zoe and Jonathan’s relationship, Benny’s brief fostering of street-kid Sam, Susan’s Green Card wedding to Mikhail, Arnie’s TV career and all the other threads that are somewhat developed through the run, none of it really makes an impact significant enough for me to get invested. It all seems to have germinated in a writers’ meeting beginning with the preposition, “Wouldn’t it be cool if...” But it all feels as if the cool stuff happens off screen, and we get a little exposition every once in a while to catch up with it.


What salvages this season of LA Law are the cases. Get two lawyers, a judge and jury into a court, witnesses, plaintiffs and defendants, and you’d be hard pressed to get anything but compelling drama and on occasion unexpected humour. LA Law also remains true to form in highlighting social issues and courting a little controversy on occasion. Aside from the usual murder cases, there are interesting cases regarding Vietnam MIAs, eco-terrorism, medical ethics, state enforced contraception, witness protection gone wrong, big chemical firms messing up third world countries, child abuse, and more. There are also the requisite comedy cases, such as the chimp custody arbitration, the cookbook plagiarism case, the patriotic condoms, and the fat guy suing the diet food company that failed him. The show also has a gaggle of guest stars to look out for, including Kevin Spacey and then child actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Also blink and you’ll miss Greg Kinnear as an extra.


LA Law Season 6 is then just as watchable as ever. It’s just not as memorable as the earlier seasons. Revelation Films give this collection a solid presentation, and it will still look nice lined up against the other five on your shelves, and it’s worth it all to see the effect that a ‘torsion’ has on Arnie Becker...