When Bruce M. Smith was a boy in the ‘50s, he liked to watch “Perry Mason” with his dad, and never-lost-a-case Mason was his introduction to the world his lawyer dad inhabited, though working dad was always off camera and out of sight.
Over the years, he has enjoyed a wide variety of TV shows about lawyers, from “Judd to the Defense” to "Night Court, “Boston Legal” and “Suits.”
Today he is an attorney in Sioux City’s Goosmann Law Firm.
Longtime colleague Jeana L. Goosmann, managing partner of the Goosmann firm, used to get a kick out of “Ally McBeal” when she was growing up. It’s a show about a young female attorney working in a law firm, and she admits she might have gotten some inspiration out of watching it.
“Legally Blonde” also made an impact.
People are also reading…
“I was in college when that movie came out,” she said. “She was a blonde sorority president with a small dog and I was a blonde sorority president with a small dog. So I got called Reese Witherspoon quite frequently in my college years.”
Jeana isn’t especially fond of legal shows, “probably for the very reason that I think they’re so far-fetched that they are ridiculous,” she said. Yet while she hates most lawyer shows in principal, a few have caught her fancy over time simply because the characters are so compelling.
Bruce still likes lawyer shows, even though they frustrate him from time to time. Much of the frustration comes from the way so many TV lawyers flout the rules of courtroom behavior, a sore point to any technician of the law.
“I probably should divorce myself from legal shows after practicing law all day, but you have a bonding emotional side to the whole experience,” he admitted. “Like … I would want to be Harvey Specter.”
“Everybody wants to be Harvey Specter,” Jeana said of the charismatic character played by Gabriel Macht in the hit USA Network TV series, “Suits,” one show that has hooked both attorneys.
“I want to look like him. I want to walk like him. I want to produce the results that he produces,” Bruce added.
Jeana started watching “Suits” after Bruce recommended it, and she had to get the DVDs of earlier seasons to catch up on the action.
‘The characters are just so well developed,” she said. “They take little aspects of what I see in other attorneys that I work with and they amplify them and magnify their small idiosyncracies. And it ends up with a really witty, funny show.”
She also appreciates that the show highlights not just the attorneys but the other members of the law firm, the assistants and paralegals, the judges and clients that help propel the action.
“One of the things that I find interesting and comical is how fast everything happens. In the legal arena, things take a long time and you spend a lot of it preparing for everything, preparing to go to court. Cases take typically 18 months. But within the show, everything happens in one hour,” she said. “It’s pretty fun that they can condense what may occur in two years into a one-hour time frame.”
But it is the characters that make the show, characters in whom she sees parts of different people in every law firm with whom she has worked. That even applies to the Louis Litt character, a conniving and weaselly, yet strangely likable attorney played by Rick Hoffman.
It also doesn’t hurt that the senior partner in “Suits” is a women.
The premise of the show – that Harvey Specter would hire Mike Ross, a brilliant college dropout with an eidetic memory, as an associate – is a bit tough to swallow, Jeana noted. But then Bruce pointed to real-life imposters Ferdinand Waldo Demara and Frank Abagnale Jr. who were played, respectively, by Tony Curtis and Leonardo DiCaprio in a couple movies who did just that.
It may be preposterous, she admitted, but it makes good TV.
Both also enjoyed the characters on “Boston Legal,” the legal dramedy featuring James Spader and William Shatner.
Shatner’s Denny Crane, Bruce noted, is kind of an Asperger’s victim who could show up in court, suck it up and magically produce the results the firm needed. “You had the dynamics of the personalities within the firm,” he said. “You know, they put up with the idiosyncracies of the other attorneys, but he got the job done.”
Parts of “Boston Legal” live on today in the real world. After a big legal victory, Jeana noted, Spader and Shatner would go out on their balcony and celebrate with drinks and cigars.
“So after a big victory, we can go out and celebrate,” she said. “And we celebrate a lot. We celebrate all kinds of things, from every time we have a new attorney joining the firm to winning a motion or the end of the work week. It’s a very unified effort which I think you would even find on legal TV drama series, this cohesiveness within the firm and the character involved.”
And life would be even grander if they could simply walk into court and win a case by saying “Denny Crane!”
