Boston Legal, season one, eipisodes 3 and 4: "Catch and Release," "Change of Course" (David E. Kelley Productions, 20th Century-Fox Television, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I screened the next two episodes from the first season of Boston Legal in sequence, “Catch and Release” and “Change of Course.” This time I was grateful for the little recaps given at the start of each episode that said, “Previously on … ,” which usually turn me off when I’m watching a show on the air (if you tell me I have to watch every episode of your show to make sense of them all, I’m much more likely not to want to watch the show at all) but which were welcome for the orientation they provided watching the series in fits and starts, as my husband Charles and I are doing. “Catch and Release” was primarily about a young attorney who is, at least as far as he knows, Donny Crane (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), son of hot-shot litigator and firm partner Denny Crane (William Shatner). He was the product of a one-night stand between his mother and Crane – at least that’s the story he’s been told – and Denny financed his education but barely met him and certainly didn’t try to be a dad to him in any emotional sense. They meet in court on opposite sides of an issue involving a mega-project a developer that’s one of the law firm’s clients wants to build in the middle of the city. It’s taken a year and a half for them to assemble the financing and got all the city and state permits they need – except one: the project would destroy a small river that is the home of a species of wild salmon.

Donny goes to court to protect the salmon habitat and fight the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to designate farmed salmon as part of the same species as wild salmon, which will allow them to remove salmon from the endangered species list and therefore allow the project to go forward. (This was odd watching in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that pretty much gutted the EPA’s ability to do much of anything.) Aided by a tough, no-nonsense Black woman judge named Leslie Bishop (Patricia Belcher), Crane fils actually wins his case – only to discover by accident that he’s not Craine pere’s son after all: he’s the result of a trick her mom had with another man, but Crane, Sr. decided to help her out financially to raise her son. Charles thought the whole idea of Freddie Prinze, Jr. being William Shatner’s son was preposterous. He even downloaded a photo of Freddie Prinze, Sr. on his phone to show what the man’s dad actually looked like, and it was nothing like William Shatner. (Charles read the above and pointed out that I’m actually the one who usually gets freaked out by movies in which people who look nothing like each other are passed off as biological relations, but to me Freddie Prinze, Jr. didn’t look that different from William Shatner that it was inconceivable that the young “Captain Kirk” Shatner couldn’t have fathered him.)

There are the usual intersecting plot lines, including a sexual harassment case in which Alan Stone (James Spader, top-billed) has to face Christine Pauley (Elizabeth Mitchell) in court after Christine tried to run himi over in her car, was sent to a mental institution, and was just released after Alan agreed to be responsible for her, on the assumption that she was going to leave Boston and live with her parents in Chicago. Only she double-crossed him and regained her former attorney’s job in Boston, and now she’s representing a man being accused of sexual harassment by a woman former employee whose case Alan is handling for the firm. Christine wins a low-ball verdict essentially by portraying the sexual harassment laws as themselves sexist because they assume the weakness of women. There’s also a plot line in which Alan’s current girlfriend, Sally Heep (Lake Bell), has to try a case defending a thief who allegedly stole a purse from someone and listed her wallet – only she manages to win by distracting the jury with an anecdote after he claims he thought it was his wallet. The fourth episode, “Change of Course,” features Edwin Poole (Larry Miller), who showed up for work in the opening episode wearing a normal suit jacket and shirt above the waist but nothing below it (he did have a nice ass), escaping from the mental hospital he was sent to and taking the case of Warren Litch (Jeremiah Birkett), a Black man who’s already gone through seven court-appointed public defenders in his upcoming trial for murdering a Black police officer. It turns out Litch knows he’s guilty and is headed for a life sentence, and he’s trying to stretch out the case as long as possible before he’s convicted. It also turns out that the police extracted a confession from him in the hospital by telling him he was about to die and having the police detective pose as the hospital’s chaplain/ Given that they’re not sure Edwin is up to handling a trial, the law firm assigns Lori Colson (Monica Potter) to be co-counsel, while the judge has had it with Litch’s shenanigans and insists that he’s not granting any more delays in the trial.

Also featured in this episode is the firm’s unscrupulous tactics in winning an acquittal for a woman CEO who’s accused of stealing a $200 scarf from a high-end store. She’s a kleptomaniac and the firm is worried that if she’s convicted, even of this relatively minor charge, her board of directors will invoke the morals clause in her contract, they’ll fire her and the flrm will lose one of its biggest clients. The one witness against her is the store clerk, Miles Tibbet (Will Radford), and much to her disgust Sally is assigned to cruise him in a bar, go on a date with him, and extract enough negative information out of him the firm will be able to get him to recant his testimony. The stratagem works, but Sally is so disgusted by what her boyfriend Alan got her to do that she at least temporarily breaks up with him, and he tells her that she’s too morally pure to be a lawyer. For my mind, the best aspect of this show was the quite chilling performance by Jeremiah Birkett as Warren Litch; he’s so matter-of-fact about his criminality he becomes oddly appealing. I can see why Boston Legal was a success – it lasted five seasons and the previous David E. Kelley series it spun off from, The Practice, lasted eight – even though the earliest episodes made it look like a show about a combination law firm and bathhouse for straight people!