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Why I'm dropping Justice
Finally! TNT&G loses a case! And the client--a kid, even--is wrongly accused! Unfortunately, it came too late for me. Last night, as I sat down to write my review of "Crucified", I realized that I loathed the idea of watching another episode of this show. Even though it has been on hiatus for three weeks because of baseball, I did not miss it one bit. As I watched, I realized that I hate this show. And I mean hate.
But as an aside-- was the acting and the writing in this episode especially horrible, or what? The parents of the victim were given AWFUL, generic lines that they delivered without emotion ("Have you been driving my car again? I told you not to!") and the attorneys' dialogue between each other was way too expositionary. I think this episode was written to catch up new viewers.
Here's why I'm no longer watching/reviewing Justice:
I was initially very excited about this show back in July when the studios sent us previews of the fall season pilots. I adored the ending pay-off where we get to see how a crime was really committed. My head swirled with the possibilities: someone could be wrongly convicted! or wrongly acquitted! But, that never happened until last night. In fact, the TNT&G law firm has won every case and so far all their clients have been innocent (they still are, even with last night's loss). The crime may not have happened just as the client said, but they still were innocent. So, my first problem is that the gimmick for this show has gotten stale. There's no pay-off at the ending that makes me go, "Ohhhhh!"
Second, the characters are atrocious. Victor Garber deserves a better role than Ron Trott, a one-dimensional, angry man who lives every second of his life on the verge of a heart attack. While that's mildly interesting, that's all there is to him. The other characters are the same: Kerr Smith plays the all-American boy who truly believes in his clients, and I'm not even sure about Rebecca Mader and Eamonn Walker 's characters. They're both a little robotic.
Third, it's way too formulaic. Many of you will argue that since Justice is a procedural, of course it's going to be formulaic. But it doesn't have to be this bad. The writers aren't getting creative within the confines of the space they've boxed themselves into. There are only so many things the lawyers can do to build their case and we're already seeing a lot of their tactics repeated from episode to episode. There's only one thing the writers do for every episode: they make us question the innocence of the client. That's all they can do! In other procedurals, like CSI and Law & Order, we go through a maze of suspects and then there's usually some sort of twist about who really did it or why they did it. But, the lawyers at TNT&G don't care who did it, they just care about who else could've done it besides their client.
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