Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

SnoopyStyle It's the L.A. law firm of McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak. In the pilot opening, divorce lawyer Arnie Becker (Corbin Bernsen) and his secretary Roxanne Melman (Susan Ruttan) find senior partner Norman Chaney dead in his office. Leland McKenzie (Richard Dysart) and Douglas Brackman, Jr. (Alan Rachins) are the other senior partners. Michael Kuzak (Harry Hamlin) is the rising star partner. They and the other various characters over the years deal with court as well as life.Steven Bochco created one of the most popular series of the '80s. It's a legal drama about a law firm in L.A. It featured some great actors who created some iconic characters. On top of that, they had great chemistry. Their interactions is half of the fun. It made a mythical sexual position an actual thing. Now that's popularity. With such a great large cast, a few defections do happen. And that is one of the reason for this show's demise. By 1992, some of the cast starts to disappear. At that point during its initial run, I lost interest. This show relies on its characters and it lost too many of them. This award winning show had 8 seasons and a movie.

fguliuzza This was a seminal show -- probably the first "lawyer show" that wasn't really a detective program in disguise. L.A. Law introduced us to many of the particulars of a law firm: The staff meeting, administrative hearings, appellate court argument, as well as almost all aspects of criminal and CIVIL litigation. It was an amazing program that, when it focused on the intriguing cases that came to the firm, was arguably the best show on television in the late 80s and early 90s. If I recall correctly only Hill Street Blues, The West Wing, and L.A. Law won 4 Emmys for best drama (now maybe Mad Men?). There's a reason this show ranks in the upper echelon of television dramas.To be fair to its critics, however, I can't remember ANY program that was this good that, almost abruptly, became so bad! Although I continued to watch it until the end, it was hit-and-miss at best, and sometimes just plain terrible after the fifth season.

DKosty123 It is hard to believe that David E. Kelly first started writing television scripts with Doogie Howser MD & then went straight to this. There is a world of difference between those efforts. This series is very entertaining.It also is much more serious than some of the later series he has done. While this series has some comedy, it has a much more serious tone than Ally McBeal or House MD which have been his later work. This series not only presents more serious issues than those later shows, but also better draw more realistic characters as well.The acting & production quality of this is very good. Richard Dysart seems the perfect actor to be the foundation of this law firm. The rest of the cast seems to fit their roles well too. Wonder if a 20 or 25 year reunion is planned for this series? A retrospective could be fun.Towards the end of the series, more of David E Kelly's humor started showing up. In fact, the last season very much resembles a trial run of Ally McBeal in it's tone. Lets not forget Boston Legal too. Kelly has continued to develop his talents in that direction since.If you like House MD or Ally McBeal, you will like this series. If you liked Boston Public (which was a little more serious) you'd like this show too. I am not sure if David Kelly has any other directions he can head but viewers sure get a lot chance to enjoy his work.

asmith-7 The previous post was less than favorable to this incredible show ("great actors, flawed writing"), so I just had to weigh in. For a moment, forget that "L.A. Law" presented some of the most compelling and unusual legal cases as drama (some of them so unusual, in fact, showrunner David E. Kelley would revisit them in his own "Picket Fences," "The Practice," and even "Ally McBeal"). "L.A. Law" brought black comedy back to television and presented sexuality and sensuality that actually advanced its storylines. The latter were core character traits of Corbin Bernsen's Arnold Becker and Jill Eikenberry's and Michael Tucker's Ann Kelsey and Stuart Markowicz, respectively. You can argue the tastefulness of these scenes and others, but you couldn't make a case for their gratuity.The writing, of course, enabled the other collaborators on this show to perform at the peaks of their abilities. The show explored some of the more difficult issues of its time through our legal adversarial process. Whether surgeons should be obligated to operate on AIDS patients, the right for the terminally ill to die, the lives of the mentally challenged, sexual dysfunctions, the pressures and responsibilities of the police -- these and other episodes paved the way for the shows we're watching today. "L.A. Law" stood on the shoulders of giants, yes, but it became a giant in its own right.Arguably the show created by Stephen Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher suffered with the departure of David. E. Kelley in its fifth season. The guys who used to run "St. Elsewhere" had a brief stint as showrunners, and viewers began tuning out when the show became less about L.A. lawyers and more about various medical maladies.That fifth season was especially dramatic, too, as several cast members also were leaving, which freed the writers from some of the constraints of series television -- namely, that characters could not change significantly from week to week.To dismiss "L.A. Law" as a show about yuppie lawyers is to misjudge a deep, poignant, and important book by its slick, glossy cover. Check it out.