Detectives, therapists, fathers and hired guns: A cross-examination of lawyer images on American television.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the evolving image of the attorney in American popular television and culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that combines the author's interests in law, English literature, television studies, history and cultural anthropology, this work examines the role that the lawyer-statesman ideal plays in reinforcing the distinctions between public and private space and the contested ways lawyer images on television both reify and critique these distinctions. Special attention is given to the pivotal role domestic lawyers had in framing popular perceptions of lawyers in light of a gradual transformation of American culture from modern to post-modern conditions. After an examination of the theoretical implications of the lawyer in Modernity, the strategies of lawyer representation is placed in the context of a late nineteenth century American culture in which lawyers were seen as a threat to Victorian values that strictly separated public and private spheres. This research focuses on novels by Wharton and Howells, newspaper advertisements, historical accounts of lawyer scandals, and proceedings of the American Bar Association. Having charted the historical antecedents to the lawyer image, this work next addresses the ways in which many of these same cultural tensions resurface in the ways lawyers are depicted on primetime television. While a 1950s drama such as Perry Mason casts the lawyer-statesman as a manly crusader for absolute truth, a lesser-known sit-com like Willy both supports and subverts this ideal in its parody. In the 1960s, the lawyer-statesman ideal showed up in programs like The Defenders, The Young Lawyers and Men-At-Law which depicted the experienced lawyers as father-figures to young lawyers. More recent lawyer programs such as Kate McShane, L.A. Law, and Ally McBeal use women attorneys, with varying degrees of success, to critique the modern myth of the public-minded lawyer. Also considered is the impact that Court TV and other network coverage of trials has had on the breakdown of the lawyer-statesman ideal in the 1990s. Appended to the main body of the dissertation is an annotated videography of programs either about law or featuring a recurring lawyer that appeared in primetime since 1948.