Review – The Firm

The Firm – NBC – 10:00/9:00pm Thursday – USA

To say that the excruciatingly long premiere episode of NBC’s The Firm did poorly in the ratings would be somewhat of an understatement as it debuted to the LOWEST RATINGS EVER for a new in-season drama. This is makes it difficult to muster up much enthusiasm for The Firm as you know its time on this earth will almost certainly be brief. Luckily for us then that The Firm is a ponderous legal drama that got the ratings it deserved. Half way through the first episode the most gripping thing about the show was worrying whether or not I’d run out of ways to write ‘this show is boring’. There have certainly been worse shows than The Firm this TV season (Charlie’s Angels springs to mind) but there haven’t been any this painfully dull.

Part of the blame for why The Firm is so boring can be placed at the feet of its leading man Josh Lucas. Josh Lucas inherits the role that belonged Tom Cruise in the 1993 film of the same name. You might recognize that Tom Cruise is a movie star, with actual charisma and the ability to get people to come to his movies no matter how strange his personal life gets. Josh Lucas on the other hand is a “movie star” a man who seems to have stumbled into the position thanks to his good looks and people like Tom Cruise saying no to various projects. Despite having seen Josh Lucas in actual movies like Glory Road and Poseidon and Sweet Home Alabama I couldn’t place his face in any of those films not because I’m bad with faces but because Josh Lucas was created in a forgettable actor factory alongside Patrick Wilson and Michael Vartan.

Surrounding what’s-his-name are a cast of people you will actually recognize from things. Molly Parker (Deadwood) plays his wife, Callum Keith Rennie (Battlestar Galactica) plays his brother and a private detective who works for his firm, and Juliette Lewis who, for some reason, plays his secretary. Lewis’s appearance here proves that while the material is pretty dire it is possible to liven up even the most tired of lines with a little bit of good acting. The only enjoyable thing about The Firm was Lewis’s performance which is even more amazing considering she is in a fairly typical secretary role with ordinary lines that would sound ordinary coming from anybody else. Juliette Lewis injects more life into her few dud lines than Josh Lucas has injected into his entire career.

The problem with Lucas’s character Blandy McBland, who the show kept insisting was called Mitch McDeere even though that couldn’t possibly be true, is that he’s given two character traits and both of them are boring. The first is that he’s a super nice guy and the second is that he’s a really good lawyer. Ooh boy are we in for some interesting fun as the super nice guy who’s really good at his job is nice to people and succeeds at stuff. At one point a judge actually stops proceedings to tell the father of the defendant how lucky he is to have McBland as his lawyer because “he’s a good human being and a good lawyer.” The main concern McBland has is worrying whether he’s being upstanding and decent enough.

The writing doesn’t help things because even though the show starts with a washed out chase scene through the streets of D.C. it then flashes back ‘six weeks earlier’ and proceeds like a typical legal drama. McBland goes to work, he gets some cases, he tries to figure out what happened, and he wins those cases. Then as the final five minutes kick in The Firm remembers that it’s promised something resembling an ongoing mystery and so we’re back in thriller mode. This show walks in, introduces itself as an exciting mystery thriller, then it sits down and proceeds to bore us with the driest legal case fathomable (a black teenager stabbed somebody, can McBland do the right thing?!) hoping we won’t notice that over an hour has gone by, but just as it’s about to get up and leave it yells BOO! with the hopes we’ll invite it back again next week.

The pilot for The Firm is such a drudge to get through and so dreadfully boring that it’s hard to see what NBC were expecting beyond terribly low ratings as viewers switched over or fell asleep. Not only have we seen every moment of this hackneyed legal drama in other shows but the whole proceeding lacks flair. Everything humourless and bland but also it’s all so incredibly dumb – honestly there’s a scene where evil people at the evil firm sit around having a conversation about how they’ve tricked McBland that somehow doesn’t end with them all cackling with laughter. All this isn’t to say there’s not an interesting show buried somewhere inside of The Firm, there is, unfortunately it’s a show about Juliette Lewis doing secretarial work – the rest of the show is a lost cause.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad

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