In case you haven’t come across it yet, the TV Writer Podcast is actually quite a nifty little thing you can listen to when you have a few moments free or are down the gym. Hosted by Canadian TV scriptwriter Gray Jones, it interviews US TV scriptwriters, discusses their programmes, how they write, the nature of the industry, what goes on behind the scenes (did you know that different acts in each Chuck script will often be written by different writers, for example?) and tips about getting into the industry.
While Jones is obviously not a journalist, it’s a decent hour talking to people who should get far more attention and who are the main creators of the TV shows we love. Or Eureka and Warehouse 13 in the latest podcast’s case:
Poor Katy Perry. As if marrying Russell Brand wasn’t bad enough, now her appearance on Sesame Street has been stopped because of complaints about her cleavage from parents. All she wanted to do was play dress up.
Yet, meanwhile, the show is busy parodying True Blood. There’s some weirdness going down on that street…
In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm Eastern/9pm Central, ABC In the UK: Not yet acquired
So with most legal dramas (eg The Defenders, LA Law, Shark, The Deep End et al), you have a very obvious set-up. You have the heroic/anti-heroic lawyers who have to defend/prosecute the obviously guilty/innocent defendant. By the end of the episode, said defendant is proven guilty/innocent thanks to our hero’s/heroes’ resourcefulness. Cue the next episode.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer likes to mix things up a little bit. For example, with 2006’s Justice, although our heroes were the intrepid defending attorneys, we never knew until the end whether the client was actually guilty or not – all we knew was that our lawyers were going to defend them to the best of their abilities, using whatever tricks they had up their sleeves.
The Whole Truth builds on this and takes it one stage further. Here we have both a heroic defending counsel and a determined prosecutor and we get to see both sides of the case built, with both lawyers using whatever tricks they can come up with to win. And at the end, we find out whether the defendant was actually guilty or innocent.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Certainly, with Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure, Numb3rs) as well as Maura Tierney (ER, Rescue Me) on board, you’d be thinking that we were onto something good. However, while you won’t feel the pain you might get from watching The Defenders, The Whole Truth is still quite an average legal drama that you can quite easily ignore without feeling you’re missing out on the cultural zeitgeist.
Here’s a trailer, followed by another, almost identical trailer – see if you can spot the difference.
