In anticipation of TNT’s upcoming legal dramedy “Franklin & Bash,” which premiers tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Eastern, we had the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream briefly interview the two stars of the show, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Breckin Meyer (during a multi-party press conference, but still).  Gosselaar is famous, of course, for playing the iconic character of Zack Morris in “Saved by the Bell” and, more recently, for his role on “NYPD Blue.”  As for Meyer, you may recognize him as the  skateboarding high school student in Clueless or for his roles in Road Trip or Can’t Hardly Wait. So, once again, we here at Abnormal Use continue our series, “Abnormal Interviews,” in which we bring you interviews with practitioners, commentators, and, now, actors.

“Franklin & Bash” is a comedy featuring Gosselaar and Meyer as two small-time lawyers with big-time courtoom antics who are recruited by a powerful megafirm.  So begins their fish-out-of-water experience, which is the central premise of the show.  Both stars seem to be very exited about their new legal show, and for good reason. By their own accounts, they’re having fun filming the series, and as you’ll see from our review of the pilot episode tomorrow, the show offers its viewers an entertaining – though not necessarily realistic – glimpse into the lives of its fictional young lawyers.

As mentioned above, we were on a multi-party press conference call with Gosselaar, and then some time later, a separate multi-party call with Meyer. Accordingly, we were only able to ask each of them one question. Fortunately for you dear readers, we here at Abnormal Use are ace interviewers, and all we need is one question. Bearing in mind that caveat, the following is a full transcript of our exchange with Gosselaar, who plays attorney Peter Bash.

Simons:  Hey, Mark-Paul.

Gosselaar:  Hey, there.

Simons:  Our readership is made up primarily of lawyers, and I know that you’ve played lawyers in the past, but I wondered what, if anything, you did to prepare for this role.

Gosselaar:  I got a tan. That’s basically it. You know, I mean, I – you know, I’d had my legal fill when I did “Raising The Bar.”  Thankfully, you know, I was able to go with David Feige, who was the creator of that show, and my character was loosely based on him. You know, I went with him and was an intern at the Bronx Defenders for about a week and sort of got my legal, you know, insight during that week, and for the last two seasons. So no, there wasn’t much that I had to question.

But if I did have a question, one of our producers and writers, one of our head writers, Bill Chais, was a defense attorney and a lot of the stories that we deal with on the show are from his background. So, if we ever have questions we have people that we can go to, and that’s always important. And well, I think we’re pretty true to – I mean obviously it’s television, you take some liberties, but I think we’re pretty true to staying true to the sort of legal, call it, the legal frame.

During an earlier part of the call, Gosselaar also shared what makes “Franklin and Bash” different from all the other legal dramas viewers have seen before on the small-screen:

Gosselaar:  Well, I think — you know, we haven’t seen comedy in the courtroom in a while. I mean, “Boston Legal” is probably the last one, “Ally McBeal” is another one, “L.A. Law” was a brilliant legal drama with elements of comedy, so I think that’s what sets it apart from what’s currently on television, as well as sort of the relationship between the two guys.

You know, you go home with these characters at the end of the day, so I think that that’s a very important element that isn’t on television on your typical legal dramas at the moment.

Later that afternoon, we joined the press conference call with Breckin Meyer, who plays attorney Jared Franklin on the series.  Here’s a transcript of our interview with him:

Simons:  Hi, Breckin.

Meyer:  Hey, how’s it going?

Simons:  Good. Our readership is made up primarily of lawyers…

Meyer:  Okay.

Simons:  . . . I wonder if I were a client of Franklin and Bash, why would I want your character, Jared, to represent me?

Meyer:  Well, the good thing is with Franklin and Bash, you get both Franklin and Bash. . . .  Jared’s a kid who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father was a — still is a high powered litigator, and he rebelled against that by not wanting to be a lawyer, but eventually had to accept that it was his calling, but if he’s going to do it he’s going to do it on his own terms. And I think you’d definitely — you’d get lawyering like you hadn’t seen before. How about that?

Simons:  Okay. And your character’s been described as quick-witted and scrappy. Do you have anything to add to that description?

Meyer:  Really kind of almost off the chart remarkably good looking. That — I mean that’s not me, that what — I mean, that’s what I’ve heard. . . .Yes, so that’s how I’d describe it.

Turn back to Abnormal Use tomorrow for our official review of the pilot, which airs tomorrow night on TNT.

Today, Abnormal Use continues its series, “Abnormal Interviews,” in which this site will conduct interviews with law professors, practitioners, and other commentators in the field. For the latest installment, we turn to University of Maine School of Law professor Jennifer B. Wriggins, who teaches Torts, Insurance Law, and Family Law. Last year, her book, The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender, and Tort Law, was published by the NYU Press. The interview is as follows:

1. What do you think is the most significant recent development in torts and products liability litigation?

I think that the continuing lack of conceptual clarity about comparative fault is very significant and interesting. What I mean is this: While contributory negligence has been on the wane for decades now there remains, I think, lots of vagueness about how its replacement, comparative fault (comparative negligence), is supposed to work. Statutes and jury instructions are often not at all clear about how the defendant’s action is supposed to be compared to the plaintiff’s action, even when they are engaging in the same activity, like driving. This is particularly the case with multi-party litigation. There is, relatedly, rather little clarity about how to quantify (and thus compare) actions by many different parties that are very different in nature. Yet, comparative fault is widely accepted and generally seen as an important improvement over contributory negligence. There is a huge disconnect, I think, with the everyday way that people think about causation and fault, and the fascinating and unwieldy system we have now with comparative fault and comparative responsibility.

2. What rule or concept in modern torts or products liability jurisprudence do you believe is the most outdated, and why?

One rule that strikes me as possibly outdated is the rule that juries are not allowed to learn about liability insurance policies. Even when a case involves an auto accident, and auto insurance is mandatory in a state (as it is in almost all states), so that jurors who are car-owners (probably most jurors) know that there is likely to be insurance, jurors are not supposed to know about insurance. I understand that it is important for the liability and damages issues not to be affected by the presence or absence of insurance, but I think it is very likely that jurors think about insurance anyway. I would want to think about this more before advocating it, but perhaps we should just give jurors the insurance information and tell them it should be kept separate from the liability and damages determinations. If they are hypothesizing about insurance and taking it into account anyway, then giving them accurate information should not hurt the process. I can see both sides of this, but I think we are probably deluding ourselves if we pretend jurors don’t know and aren’t thinking about the existence of liability insurance.

3. You have written much on the role of race and gender in litigation. In your view, how do these concepts affect tort cases specifically, and what would you advise civil litigators to keep in mind on that front?

One place where race and gender can come into play is damages. In my book, The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender and Tort Law (NYU Press 2010), my co-author Martha Chamallas and I talk about how in cases where an individual lacks an earnings history (for example a child) and suffers an injury that will affect future earnings, experts and courts still use race-based and gender-based earnings tables to project earnings into the future. Many experts and lawyers, I think, simply assume that these categories have to be used and don’t think of them as problematic at all. We argue that this use of tables is deeply problematic and potentially unconstitutional because using the tables in court is in effect a race-based or gender-based classification. Judge Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York issued a ruling in October 2008 that agreed with this position. We also talk about how caps on non-economic damages can affect claims of women, members of racial minorities, and minority women, who may have serious injuries but small lost earnings, making their claims perhaps too small to be worth bringing. Research has suggested this is happening in California and Texas, for example.

BONUS QUESTION: What do you think is the most interesting depiction of the interaction of law and medicine in popular culture, and why?

One of the most insightful depictions of the interaction of law and medicine in popular culture is a book, Damages, by Barry Werth (1998). He deals in a very nuanced way with the interaction of insurance, doctors, patients, and lawyers in a heart-breaking Connecticut infant cerebral palsy case. It’s also a great read.

BIOGRAPHY: Professor Jennifer B. Wriggins, the Sumner T. Bernstein Professor of Law at the University of Maine School of Law, teaches Torts, Insurance Law, and Family Law. Upon receiving her J.D., Professor Wriggins served as Clerk to Hon. Edward T. Gignoux, U.S. District Judge in Portland, Maine. She was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Boston University School of Law in Spring 2005.

Today, Abnormal Use continues its series, “Abnormal Interviews,” in which this site will conduct interviews with law professors, practitioners and makers of legal themed popular culture. For the latest installment, we turn to Adam Avery, President and Brewmaster of the Avery Brewing Company. Why the president of a brewing company? The answer is two-fold. First, we here at Abnormal Use love to experiment (in moderation of course) with the greatest craft beers our country has to offer. Second, Avery produces a Belgian-style ale known as Collaboration Not Litigation. Once we heard the delightful name of that brew, we simply had to talk to its maker. Avery was kind enough to submit to a brief interview about the ale and the source of its name.

AVERY: I believe 2000, 2001, I met Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing Company, and we became really good friends. . . . [W]e both had a beer called Salvation. We had mutual friends and, you know, so we were destined to meet and we hit it off. I asked, “Are you going to have a problem with [the beers with the same name]?” . . . I do remember him saying at some time we need to figure out – we should do something together about this. . . . So, the years went by, we became really close friends, and I visited him a bunch of times. When I got out there – I believe it was like 2004 – I showed up at his brew pub and pounded a bunch of beers. We started talking about this idea and his wife, Natalie, came up with the idea to call it Collaboration Not Litigation because he does a lot of “-tion” beers. He has Consecration, Damnation . . .He just has this theme going.

[ON THE BREWING OF THE ALE]

AVERY: We sat down and we blended both of our beers together out of the bottles and came up with the percentage that we thought was really good. So we said as soon as we have time we’re going to do this. We’re going to do a batch of beer and we’ll blend them and we’ll sell it. Well, these collaborations started to become more and more popular. Somebody called me from a brew magazine, and I told him the story. It goes to press. So I see it in this magazine, and I called Vinnie and say, “Hey, we’re kind of f***** here. We actually have to do this beer now, right?” So, he came here to the brewery in 2006 or 2007. He brewed a batch of his beer with us and then we brewed ours. We blended them at the right rate and then boom. I thought it was going to be a one and done. We sold a lot. People were excited about it, so we do a small batch once a year. We brew it typically in January. . . . It’s a fun beer. It’s more about like it just shows the craft industry is really about sticking together and about the rising tide floats all boats, that sort of thing.

[THOUGHTS ON ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION]

1) What do you think is the most significant recent development in torts and product liability litigation?

It goes beyond tort and product-liability litigation to some extent, but the erosion of the preemption doctrine is of some concern. It’s ironic that, even as we see the federal government assert its authority over local affairs in legislation such as PPACA and cases like United States v. Arizona, we’re simultaneously seeing this administration insist that state court juries should exercise dominion over interstate commerce already fully regulated by the federal government. This seems precisely backwards.

2) The Wall Street Journal has a characterized you as a “leading tort reform advocate.” In your view, why is tort reform needed in our system, generally, and in product liability litigation, specifically?

I view tort reform as a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. I consider myself a consumer advocate, and it just so happens that the pendulum of the legal system has swung so far in favor of lawyers that consumers are being hurt, and tort reform is needed to restore balance. If ever the pendulum swings too far the other way, you’ll see me switch sides on these debates. As it is, if anyone asks me, I tell them I oppose collateral source reform, which just punishes individuals with the foresight to purchase insurance.

There are so many places where reform is needed. The judiciary and the bar aren’t doing enough to punish or deter fraudulent cases. We have very sensible rules that courts don’t second guess the good faith decisions of lawyers or prosecutors, or the exercise of business judgment by executives, but those rules are thrown out the window when it comes to second guessing the design decisions of engineers or the judgment calls of physicians, though there is every reason to believe that courts are even less likely to get those questions right, especially in hindsight. And uncapped noneconomic or punitive damages introduces an element of complete randomness into the system. Even when the system is considered to be “working,” the majority of the expense of the system goes to paying the administrative costs of the attorneys rather than to the putative victims: we wouldn’t tolerate that level of overhead in any other sector of the public or private economy. All of these features distort incentives, deter innovation, result in unjust punishment of the innocent, and hurt the economy and consumers in the long run.

3) Recently, we here at Abnormal Use have written several pieces regarding the Stella Liebeck hot coffee case in which we have cited some of the articles you have written on the subject. Why have you taken an interest in that litigation, and why is it important to dispel some of the “urban legends” that have arisen?

For twenty years I’ve had an interest in urban legends (I was friends with the Snopeses before there was a snopes.com), and several of them stem from the legal arena. One of my favorites involves the Baby Ruth bar: it’s a famous trivia answer that the candy bar was named after Grover Cleveland’s daughter, rather than the baseball player Babe Ruth. Snopes and I did some research in the 1990s, and concluded that the “Grover Cleveland’s daughter” story was almost certainly invented for purposes of trademark litigation against Babe Ruth, who had a competing candy bar.

The Stella Liebeck case was exactly the sort of thing that turns into an urban legend, and there are certainly a lot of inaccuracies that crept into the story as it went viral. The Liebeck case got politicized, however: it was an outrageous result and picked up as a poster child for tort reform, and, fascinatingly, the trial lawyer lobby, instead of reasonably saying “Look: the justice system is never going to be 100 percent correct, there have been a dozen hot coffee cases before this one where the courts got it right and threw it out, and you can’t make public policy based on a single anecdote just because the judge made a mistake here” decided to engage in a misinformation campaign to argue that the Liebeck case was both correct and an aspirational result for our tort system – and a disturbing number of law professors joined that cause. If you Google for the case, the vast majority of results are trial-lawyer sites filled with misstatements of the facts and laws. It’s gotten to the point that, in the majority of tort reform debates I participate in, it’s the trial lawyer who is the first to introduce the subject. I’ve been following the case and rebutting the misinformation on both sides since it first made the news, and it just so happens that the majority of misinformation is coming from the plaintiffs’ lawyer side these days. One of these days, I’ll lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks and write a law review article on the subject so there can be a one stop place for truthful information and arguments about the case.

I have a popular talk I give to law schools where I talk about the hot coffee case and a couple of other lawsuits against McDonald’s called “The Law of McDonald’s” and use that as the framework to talk about the two visions of tort law: personal responsibility versus deep pocket compensation of victims, and why I prefer the personal responsibility route.

4) As the founder of the Center for Class Action Fairness, you have sought to protect the interest of consumers in class action settlements. In your opinion, what needs to be done in order to balance the interest of consumers in class action settlements with the need for tort reform?

Assuming that the Supreme Court doesn’t do anything crazy in the Wal-Mart case, the law is, for the most part, in the right place, and it’s just a question of judges exercising their responsibility to apply it correctly – which is hard to do when the settling parties are making an ex parte presentation to the court, and good-faith objectors don’t have the financial incentive to hire a lawyer to make sure the court gets it right. That’s why I do the pro bono representation that I do: someone’s got to do it.

There are certainly some legislative tweaks possible to resolve some ambiguities in the law that class action lawyers have used to benefit themselves at the expense of consumers. I don’t think it’s a tort reform thing; it should be a bipartisan good government thing. Plaintiffs’ lawyers, as a group, should be supporting what I do, because class action lawyers like Milberg and like Kabateck Brown Kellner make them all look bad when they negotiate settlements that don’t do anything for the class but pay the lawyers millions.

BONUS QUESTION: What do you think is the most interesting depiction of products liability and/or class actions in popular culture, and why?

Today, Abnormal Use once again continues its series, “Abnormal Interviews,” in which this site will conduct brief interviews with law professors, practitioners, and makers of legal themed popular culture. For the latest installment, we turn to Brian Dale Allen Strouse, a vocalist and guitarist of the Philadelphia based band, The Lawsuits. We’re fascinated with that band’s decision to name itself after the chief component of litigation. Strouse was kind enough to submit to a brief interview with Abnormal Use about his band’s music and name.

1) How did you decide to call yourselves The Lawsuits?

We decided on the name The Lawsuits because originally we were called The Mondays. . . . [T]here was a band called The Mondays from New York (or New Jersey), and they had [an] interest in playing our favorite bar where we got our start (John and Peter’s, New Hope, PA). We called to confirm a date for a show we had booked, and the girl called me Rick or James or Robert or Zimmy, and I said, “Excuse me?” Turns out, the bar booked The Mondays by accident, when they were intending to book THE MONDAYS. We thought it’d be clever to change our name to The Lawsuits, as we were in a situation where legal matters possibly could have been taken. Plus, two of my brothers are lawyers, and it wasn’t already a band name.

2) What has been the reaction to that choice of name?

The reaction has been mixed. The name personally has grown on me and the other members, but believe me, we’ve had our fair share of people claiming we can do better, or the name “turns them off.” I like that, though. If I can bring out an emotion of dislike, then at least I’m getting something in return from the audience. They don’t like the band name, but they like the band? Even better. Anything to position yourself strategically, placing yourself (in this case, the band) in a situation where, from the moment we walk into the venue, we’re at a disadvantage. It’s the Rudy factor, the underdog story. It’s true art. We’re trying to infect the audience, not so much live, but more so with the recorded music. And once someone is infected, (Leo Tolstoy would agree) they can’t not get “it.” It’s real, it’s honest, it’s wholly human. Some songs take two years to finish, some take two minutes, but the bottom line is this: Regardless of the name itself, once someone really gives the music a shot, and if they’re capable of liking the music (can’t deny preferences and tastes), they will see that there is something bright and strangely refreshing going on in Philadelphia.

3) How would you describe your music?

We tend to describe our music as folk-rock-blues.

4) What do you think is the biggest challenge facing musicians in 2011?

The biggest challenge that musicians face in the year 2011 is the fact the market flooded, and there are only a handful of boats floating around. There are so many musicians, and so many outlets musicians can use to promote their music. Glenn Morrow, the owner of Bar/None Records in Weehawken New Jersey did an interview . . . [in which] he said something like this, “The modern day label’s job is to weed through all the bands out there and find that gem.” Seems to be that labels now-a-days are much more cautious with their time, energy, and money. I suppose they must be. It is a business. Labels aren’t everything, though, when we dissect the idea of “what it takes to make it” or “What’s standing in my way between me and my goal?” or “What’s my biggest challenge?”, the answer is “What is it?” or “What’s your goal, really?” or “Biggest challenge, in what sense?” Ideally, I’d have tons of money, time, energy, contacts, oh, and talent, and then I’d simply combine all of that together in a large saucepan over medium heat and just sit back. However, the reality of it is this: The average musician has a finite amount of money, time, energy, contacts, and talent. They must rely on the “unexplainable” [and] “unteachable” things like luck and a workhorse attitude. In short, the biggest challenge facing musicians in 2011 is the face they see in the mirror. Even though the market is flooded and labels aren’t biting, almost anything is possible with belief.

5) As musicians, what do you think of the process of working with lawyers in the music industry?

As a self-proclaimed musician, I don’t think much about the process of working with an entertainment lawyer because I have yet to do so. I believe they are an important piece of the puzzle. They are, like the a-typical musician, “thinkers”- modern day philosophers in a sense. Also, everything now-a-days comes with a contract, and lawyers are expected to excel at deciphering the fine print. They are expected to protect the best interests of their client and advise their clients on which path to take.

BONUS QUESTION: What is your favorite song about the law or legal themes?

The Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought The Law” is a good one. The Clash did a great version of it, as well. The Dead Kennedy’s also did a version. I believe their’s goes, “I fought the law, and I won.”

Here’s a few videos of the band we found on YouTube (including one tune called “Appeal #46” and a cover of The Beatles’ “Oh, Darling”:

BIOGRAPHY: The Pennsylvania band The Lawsuits formed in 2008 as a four piece rock band, morphed into a ten piece band in 2009, and fine tuned the sound back to a four piece the same year. At present, the Lawsuits are:

Brian Dale Allen Strouse – Vocals, Guitar
Josh Friedman – Drums
Brendan Cunningham – Bass, Vocals
Vanessa Winters – Vocals

Tomorrow marks the release of Texas attorney Larry D. Thompson’s new novel, The Trial, a legal thriller which chronicles the plight of a small town attorney litigating against a fictional international pharmaceutical company. The book’s protagonist, Lucas Vaughn, is a former Houston-based trial lawyer who migrates to a small Texas town to escape the stress associated with his trial work. His plan appears to be working as his health improves and he is finally able to mend his troubled relationship with his teenage daughter, Samantha. Unfortunately, his new found peace is short-lived. After participating in a clinical trial for a drug manufactured by the fictional drug company Ceventa, Samantha contracts severe drug-induced hepatitis. With her life dwindling away, Vaughn takes the fight to the courtroom. During the litigation, he quickly learns that there are no limits to what Ceventa will do to protect its “revolutionary” new drug. You can see the novel’s “book trailer” (complete with dramatic music) here.

We here at Abnormal Use were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interview Mr. Thompson about his new book and his inspiration for the tale.

[ON PORTRAYING HIMSELF IN THE NOVEL]

FARR: The Trial’s protagonist, Lucas Vaughn is a seasoned UT [University of Texas] law grad, Houston-based trial lawyer. Did you see a little bit of yourself in Lucas?

THOMPSON: Not really. There’s more of me in my first novel, So Help Me God. The protagonist in [So Help Me God] is Todd Duncan. He’s primarily a defense lawyer, so there’s more of me in him. [With Lucas Vaughn] I just wanted a character who had been around the courthouse some. I wanted to put him in a small town, so there’s really none of me. And of course, he was a plaintiff’s lawyer and I had been primarily defense. Although, like any defense lawyer, if a good plaintiff’s case comes along and it’s not against the client, then I’m happy to take the case.

[DEPICTING A LAWYER’S QUALITY OF LIFE]

FARR: Quality of life and the challenge of balancing a successful career with a good home life are serious issues in the legal community. What does the novel say about these issues – particularly in the context of Lucas and his relationship with his daughter, Samantha?

THOMPSON: Well, I think Lucas Vaughn thought he was being a good father. He was faced with having to raise a daughter by himself and I think he thought that “I provided a roof over her head and three meals a day and see her a few hours now and then,” then that’s what a father is supposed to do. He had the rude awakening when he moved her to San Marcos and discovered that his method of fathering really wasn’t all that good. He moved, and he changed his lifestyle. He didn’t change his method in fathering until Samantha flunked out of [Texas] A&M. It was his romantic interest, Sue Ellen, who finally said you need to change it [his parenting style], and he did. That gave him about a year’s worth of a good father/daughter relationship before she took the drug. My old deceased law partner said once that the “law is a jealous mistress.” And that is, in fact, true. No matter what you’re doing, you cannot let it consume you and you’ve got to find time for family. Actually, you’ve got to make time for family. If you don’t, then you end up with problems with your kids and problems with your spouse.

[DIFFICULTY OF REPRESENTING FAMILY]

FARR: In the novel, Lucas represents his daughter as she’s dying of liver failure against the clinical trial physician and Ceventa, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the clinical drug. How difficult do you think it would be for a lawyer to actually represent a loved one under these circumstances?

THOMPSON: Hugely difficult. I mean, nearly impossible. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody that they represent a family member. I have some personal experience in that. My brother was a successful lawyer in the eighties. He died way too young. He wrote crime non-fiction. He got sued for libel for a book called Blood and Money in Texas. The first lawsuit was a nothing lawsuit when he lived in Los Angeles. I said, “I’ll handle that for you, and we’ll dispose of it pretty quickly.” Then came two other more serious lawsuits. Suddenly, I’m representing my own brother with three lawsuits, two of which were with very strong plaintiff attorneys. So I had a few sleepless nights as we went through those. We won all three of them primarily because my brother had gotten all his facts right. But to have to represent your daughter when she’s dying is something really that no lawyer in his right mind ought to do.

[ON REALISTIC DEPICTIONS OF THE LEGAL PROCESS]

THOMPSON: I want to make sure that any lawyer that reads this book will think, “Okay, the guy that wrote it really knows something about trials and evidence and what goes on in a lawsuit. It’s not ‘made up.'” From that standpoint, I generally succeed. My first novel had a trial at the end. This one has a trial at the end. The one I’m starting now will end up with a trial. I want lawyers to read it and think, “Okay, this guy really does know something about trying lawsuits.”

[ON MAKING LITIGATION INTERESTING]

FARR: The Trial is about far more than just those proceedings in front of the jury, the trial itself. In the book, you go through the rigors of written discovery, depositions, and pretrial motions. What were the challenges of, not only including a large part of the litigation process in a 300 page novel, but also of making it interesting to the reader?

THOMPSON: That is a challenge. I think the only way it can be done is that you have to – you can’t have talking heads for too long a period of time in any book. The reader is going to get bored when that happens. I think you have to mix in (along with the discovery and the depositions) . . . some scenes that involve a little more conflict, a little more drama, something totally apart from the discovery process itself. I think that’s the only way you can really keep a reader’s attention if you’re talking about discovery and hearings at the courthouse and that kind of thing.

[ISSUES WITH THE LENGTH OF COMPLEX LITIGATION]

FARR: One of the ways you were able to kind of condense the process, I guess, was to have the trial expedited due to the circumstances surrounding Samantha’s health. I believe that Ceventa had 90 days to prepare for trial. In practice, a case of this magnitude can be in litigation for a couple of years before it ever goes to trial, if at all. Do you think that courts should do more to expedite the process – especially in situations like Samantha’s?

THOMPSON: Absolutely. I think that – having been a trial lawyer for a long time, I think we [trial lawyers] waste far too much time in discovery. I really think that we could cut out about three quarters of it and it would not affect the outcome. I’ve actually got a plaintiff bad faith case against a disability carrier that I’m going to go to trial in September, and I’ve elected not to depose anybody from the insurance company. . . . I’ve just decided I’ve got their claim file. I know where I want to go with it. I’ve just decided that I’ve tried enough lawsuits that I’ll cross-examine them at the courthouse for the first time. . . . Of course, the big problem is that you go up against a big insurance company or a big pharmaceutical company or even a big products manufacturer, and they want to wear down the plaintiff’s lawyer and the plaintiff if they can drag it out long enough. I’ve seen it and know it happens. I’ve done it myself. It may not be the best way to achieve justice, but sometimes the money they’re willing to throw at it can just cause one delay after another.

[ON THE DEPICTION OF PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES]

FARR: In the novel, Ceventa, the pharmaceutical company, takes some pretty drastic measures – bribery, kidnapping, and murder – to not only have their drug approved by the FDA, but also to protect their interests during the course of the trial itself. Obviously, The Trial is a fiction novel, but were you concerned in any way as a defense attorney about the message that this may convey to readers about large corporations and corporate interests?

THOMPSON: Not really. The reason is because I did do a lot of research. Now, short of murder and kidnapping, well, maybe not even that because where I got interested in this subject was I had a doctor who was on the periphery of the VIOXX litigation and that got me interested in it. There’s a whistle blower named David Graham, who still works for the FDA. He’s a medical doctor and he was interviewed when he blew the whistle on VIOXX and all the problems that it was causing with the heart. He was interviewed by CNN and a question was specifically asked to him, “Because you have come forward and taken this position against Merck [manufacturer of VIOXX], are you in fear for your life?” He [Graham] just said, “Well, I try not to think about that. I am going to do what I think is right.” So far nothing has happened. . . . I’m stretching it a little bit when I tie in kidnapping and murder. As far as bribery , there’s evidence that the FDA has – some people on the FDA have taken bribes. It’s not too big a leap to say that a drug company might commit something like that. But, obviously, that’s fiction.

[ON REPRESENTING THE PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY]

FARR: If you were standing in Audrey Metcalf’s shoes representing Ceventa, would you have handled the case any differently? Are there any things that you may have done that Audrey did not do during the course of the litigation?

THOMPSON: Good question. I don’t think anybody has posed that question to me. . . . What could she have done differently that might have impacted on the trial itself? I think things got out of her hands. I think she was doing a good job as a defense lawyer. She was throwing up obstacles. She had actually kept the clinical trial results out of evidence with a very innovative theory that the results didn’t make any difference because Samantha was participating in the trial itself. I think that she was on the right track until the results of the clinical trial, including the falsified data, came to light through Ryan Sinclair. I think that once that was done the die was probably cast. But I think if that had not come to light, then I think she was on track to win the case. I don’t think she ever – she, herself, did not know that there was fraud involved in the trial itself. So I really think she did a good job. It was her client who was the one that really torpedoed the case.

[ON WRITING A NOVEL WHILE WORKING AS AN ATTORNEY]

THOMPSON: . . . [J]ust a matter of desire and self discipline. If once you decide you want to write, if you’re still a full time lawyer, then you have to get up a little earlier in the morning and write a couple of hours in the morning and then go to the office. That’s assuming you’re not in trial. If you’re in trial or getting ready for trial, then you’ve got to set the book aside and you’ve got to focus on your trial. . . . I couldn’t do it when I was in your stage in life [young associate] and I was too busy with . . . trial and family and . . . all the other stuff that was part of the world then. That took up all my time and I couldn’t have possibly written a book then. But, when my youngest [child] graduated from college and I said okay, I think I’ll give it a try.

[ON WRITING FROM THE PLAINTIFF’S PERSPECTIVE]

THOMPSON: I think David versus Goliath always has an appeal. So if you’re going to write a David versus big old Goliath story, you want to make David the protagonist. So – actually, I’ll give credit to John Grisham who’s the master of this genre in that he usually has, at least in some of his early novels, . . . some little guy against a big establishment company industry figure or something of that sort. And they succeeded. So I decided, well, if it’s good enough for Grisham, then I think I will. Nobody’s done one on the pharmaceutical companies really, so if I’m going to do one on the pharmaceutical companies, I don’t want to make the drug companies the good guys. I want them to be the bad guys.

[DEFENSE AS THE GOOD GUYS?]

FARR: Do you think it’s possible to tell a story, at least a story that people would actually want to read, where the corporate defendant is the good guy?

THOMPSON: Yes. Actually, I’ll direct you back to my first novel, So Help Me God. It’s not really about a corporate defendant, but I decided that for my first novel I took on a noncontroversial subject. I took on the abortion controversy. I decided I wanted to write a novel that would tell both sides of that without taking sides. I wrote it and I submitted it to a bunch of publishers and agents and, not surprisingly, got rejected by everybody – every single one of them. . . In that I actually presented both sides as evenly as I could. I had two really good, different personalities – lawyers on each side. I wanted to show that the – that lawyers can be professional adversaries, but still not take it personally as we so often see in what we do. . . and that there could be a trial where both sides could have really good lawyers. Both sides could have really good cases to present. Then I thought of a way so that I could end the story without taking a side as far as pro-life or pro-choice, which I did. But that doesn’t quite answer your question about the corporation. Can a corporation be a good guy and a protagonist? I would think probably the best way a corporation could do that is if you made the antagonist the federal government. Most people do not personally align themselves with big corporations. I’ve represented too many in my time, and you have, too. I know you haven’t been practicing very long. Juries usually don’t like big corporations. That’s one of our problems when we defend them.

BIOGRAPHY: Larry D. Thompson is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law and is a member of Houston’s Lorance & Thompson, PC. While he has tried numerous cases involving products liability, medical malpractice, insurance coverage, and health care throughout his career, in recent years, over seventy percent of his practice has been in the defense of physicians and health care providers.

Twenty years ago today, on March 15, 1991, the film Class Action was released to theatres. Directed by Michael Apted, written by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames, and Samantha Shad, and produced by Robert W. Cort, Ted Field, Scott Kroopf (as well as Shelby and Ames), the film chronicles a products liability suit involving an allegedly defective station wagon, which when struck from the rear when the left turn signal is operating, bursts into flames. Essentially, the lawsuit is a fictional version of the famous Ford Pinto litigation. However, the real conflict in the film was familial in nature: Big Law corporate defense attorney Maggie Ward (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who represents the automotive company in the suit, is the estranged daughter of Jedediah Tucker Ward (Gene Hackman), the flamboyant plaintiffs’ attorney who brought the suit. Watching the film twenty years later, it’s notable that it made a real attempt to accurately depict the legal process. There are scenes featuring a motion to compel hearing, a discovery document dump, a contentious Plaintiff’s deposition, and ethical dilemmas aplenty for both sides of the bar. Interestingly, the film uses each legal sequence to further and elaborate upon the strained relationship between the father and daughter.

We here at Abnormal Use were fortunate enough to obtain an interview with producer Robert W. Cort and writer-producers Carolyn Shelby and Christopher Ames.

Excerpts of that interview follow below:

[ON REALISTIC DEPICTIONS OF THE LEGAL PROCESS]

SHELBY: It was really a tribute to, well first of all, Michael Apted, the director, [who] came from the documentary world. And he was very committed to doing as honest a depiction of the legal process as you can in a movie. There just has to be some, artistic license to be taken, but he got technical advice, and I was very happy when the movie came out. For years thereafter, various and sundry legal journals would do ratings of movies, and Class Action would always be rated very highly, and the overwhelming reaction was that it did as good a job as was possible to depict the legal process. I was very proud of that because we did work very hard, and we had the luck of a documentarian as our director and the luck of time and the luxury of time to do as good a job as humanly possible when you have to make a story have a true line and you’ve got to focus on characters.

[LOOKING BACK 20 YEARS AT THE FILM]

DEDMAN: Looking back twenty years, what are your thoughts on the film and how it was received as a courtroom or legal drama?

CORT: . . . [O]ne could never get this movie made today . . . Movies in which the ambiguities, the ambivalences, the grays of the world, in which character rules over plot, are almost impossible to get made. The business has changed so much, and I often say that one of the really fortunate things in my career is that I had my career at a time when I could do movies like Class Action, and I have such fond memories and [am] so proud of it. . . . Its really core idea is a relationship between a father and a daughter. It takes the kind of classic, Father of the Bride relationship between a father and a daughter and puts it into, a much darker, much more interesting context and plays out family dynamics as it affects the story.

. . . [W]e began to realize that the father/daughter dynamic was just really a fascinating thing, and then the surrogate son in the part played by Laurence Fishburne became a really interesting character [in conjunction with] the divided loyalties of the daughter. I look back and I’m struck by the ambition of the movie . . . .

SHELBY: . . . When we wrote Class Action with Robert, we went through five years of working [and] did 25 drafts. And that allowed us to go quite a while going in different directions and exploring different ways to do it. You can’t do that now. People make their decisions after one draft or so as to whether or not it’s going to get made.

. . .

CORT: [W]e were incredibly fortunate to be able to develop this in a way outside of the studio. We did develop it completely outside of the studio framework, and we sold it to Fox ,but we were not forced to go through a process. . . . Even in the eighties, even in the nineties, they kind of took the flesh off of anything. So, and I think if you want to look at that, most, many, many, many really wonderful movies were sort of developed outside the studio system.

[CASTING THE FILM; THE NEAR CASTING OF JULIA ROBERTS]

DEDMAN: How did Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio become involved with the project?

CORT: . . . Gene was always kind of in our mind. We wanted a very powerful character who played against the Henry Fonda of that character . . . We wanted someone who had been toughened and was tough because that’s who those people are; they’re not saints. They’re rough people even if their passions will have been shaded over into obsessiveness. And if you look at a lot of Hackman’s roles, going back to Popeye [Doyle] and The Conversation, you see a character in pursuit of what he believes is right [who] will go to any length and ignore everything else, including, in this particular case, his daughter.

. . . I had seen Mystic Pizza, and there was an enormous amount of heat about this young actress and it was, of course, Julia Roberts. We had given it to a few other major actresses and we’d been passed on . . . The character had a lot of gravitas and huge intelligence and a fair piece of alienation even though she was working very much within the system. . . . Michael Apted and I and Scott and Chris and Carolyn met with Julia, kind of saw what she was like, and she desperately wanted to do the movie. And we really believed in her. I was friendly with the people at Disney and knew that they had not released Pretty Woman yet, but that they were through the roof on the movie. They thought that she was going to be the biggest movie star around and she desperately wanted to do it, we wanted her, Joe Roth, who was the head of Fox, just didn’t believe in her, and he just kept fighting us and fighting us and he said “Well, all right maybe.” And we thought, “Oh my God, we’re going to get her.” And then he called me one day, and he said, “Forget Julia Roberts.” He said, “I have just seen the biggest movie star of her generation.” And he had just come from a screening of James Cameron’s The Abyss, in which Mary Elizabeth starred. Mary Elizabeth had been in, at that time, The Color of Money, in which she was great. She’s a terrific actress, absolutely a terrific actress. We couldn’t see the movie because Cameron wouldn’t show us. We never got to see it. Joe was sure it was going to be titanic. Obviously, it turned out not to be titanic. He said, “You’ve got to go to her, and if she doesn’t do it, all right you can use Julia Roberts.” So, we made the offer, she was represented by a man named Sam Cohn, who is a legendary agent in New York, and he gave it to her, and she delayed, and she hadn’t read it. I kept calling, and I said, “Sam, we need an answer ,”and he said, “Yeah, I’ll get you an answer.” I called Roth, and I said, “Look, we’re just getting jerked around, let us go with Julia.” He said, “All right, I’m calling Sam. If she doesn’t commit to it by noon on Friday, noon L.A. time, 3:00 in the afternoon in New York, go with Julia Roberts.” I absolutely kid you not, at 11:55, the phone rang in my office in L.A. and it was Sam Cohn saying “All right, Mary Elizabeth will do the movie.” So, by five minutes, we missed the part being played by Julia Roberts. And I think that it wasn’t just, in my opinion, the fact that Julia Roberts became this enormous star, and we would have been following Pretty Woman, [adding] incalculable value to that. But I think that Mary Elizabeth is a very dramatic actress, and she always went for the very dramatic and the very hard. And Julia, by nature of who she was and what she brought to it, always had that vulnerable, softer quality. And I think it would have been, opposite Hackman . . . it would have taken the movie, perhaps from a commercial standpoint, to another dimension. And the great story was that she got so mad that she went to see Joe Roth and said, “You didn’t believe in me,” and she and Joe Roth became unbelievably good friends. Basically, I didn’t talk to her again until she did Runaway Bride for us.

[DEPICTING THE CHALLENGES OF WOMEN LAWYERS]

DEDMAN: The Maggie character is an interesting one because she is both a young lawyer who wants to make partner, but also a woman in a profession that is dominated by men ,particularly at that time. How do you think the film addresses those issues, and do you think that’s changed in the last twenty years?

AMES: We talked a lot about this in the development of the script. . . . [W]e hung a lantern on that very issue with one particular piece of dialogue between her and her lover, who was also her boss, where she said “I want to make partner on my own, it’s different for a woman in a firm.” I’m not so sure that’s the case anymore. I hope it’s not the case. But certainly in those days, particularly because she was sexually involved with her boss, there was a tremendous stain that she was trying very, very hard to stay away from.

[DEPICTING THE LAW AND FAMILY STRIFE]

DEDMAN: You mentioned the film does portray not just the actions of lawyers in the courtroom but also how some of what happens in the courtroom bleeds into the family life. How many of Jed’s issues with respect to how he relates to Maggie are the result of him being a lawyer as opposed to him just being who he is as a person?

AMES: Well, I don’t think you can necessarily divorce one from the other. It strikes me with Jed that his was a gigantic ego and that informed everything he did, both in his own family and in court. Jed was the kind of character who believed that he could get away with anything just because of the sheer strength of his character. One of the things that we talked to Robert about from the very first day we started developing this script was that we were going to make him a “people’s lawyer” and her a “corporate lawyer.” We had to give each of them significantly large other dimensions to their lives which is why we made him morally compromised and why we made her somebody who second guessed her own decisions.

CORT: Look at Martin Luther King and his sexual peccadilloes. People of that ego, whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it for the right reasons or they tend to believe they are. There is so much testosterone in those people, so much drive, that they need sort of eat everything in their path. I think he was a hugely compelling character in that movie. I never knew anyone who ever said anything other than he felt real.

AMES: He was patterned on some real people. There was a little of Alan Dershowitz in him. There was a little of Tony Serra in him, too. As a matter of fact, the office that you see Jed in – his “office” was Tony Serra’s office – complete with the ashes of a former drug dealer/client [which] was sitting on the desk.

SHELBY: That was put to death by order of the court. And there was artwork all over from prisoners in prison who were using their served out time to paint art.

AMES: So we did have real models out there. Bill Kunstler was a model for him, also. He probably came closer to Kunstler than anybody else.

[REACTIONS OF LAWYERS TO THE FILM]

DEDMAN: What kind of reactions have you gotten from lawyers over the years about the legal elements of the film?

SHELBY: . . . [W]e used to go to theaters that were showing it, and we would come in, all the theaters got to know us, we would come in the last ten minutes of the movie . . . follow the people out and listen to the comments. And we always gravitated toward the lawyers who would be in great debate as they left about [whether the conduct depicted was] ethical. “Could they do this ?” and it went back and forth, and it was hysterical to listen to. But this was wonderful, because there was such huge debate, and these lawyers were having the time of their lives trying to analyze the movie and mainly coming out very positively.

AMES: Perhaps the highest compliments I ever got about the movie was my daughter called me breathless one day from George Washington University . . . to inform me that the plot of this movie was being taught in one of her classes that day and she about fell out of the chair.

[LEGAL ETHICS AND THE FILM]

DEDMAN: . . . [T]here is sort of a debate about some of the ethical decisions made by the lawyers in the film. What Maggie does at the end is probably something she feels is right but may be something that would get her in trouble with the disciplinary authorities.

AMES: I’ve heard arguments for twenty years on both sides of the issues. There are two issues that people always raise about it. Number one is that and number two is whether a father and daughter really could go up against each other in court, and we were scrupulous in our desire to make this an accurate movie.

SHELBY: We also found it was fun during the process of researching and writing it, particularly towards latter stages. At every stage, we wrote a draft that went to the studio, got a response from the legal department who would tell us do this, do that, this isn’t [accurate], and so we would adapt appropriately. So all the way through the process we were getting notes from attorneys, and ironically, we finally hired . . . a technical adviser two weeks before we were going into production. And he was not an entertainment attorney, he was a products liability attorney, and he said, “Well, [I] really loved the script, but it’s not a class action.” How could this be! We came to realize that “Oh, wow, these lawyers are very specialized in their knowledge level, and all these attorneys that we’ve been talking to have not been in the field that was appropriate.” So we then talked to three different class action attorneys who read it and promptly gave us some notes to truly make it accurately a class action. . . . [B]ut the technical advisor, who was a products liability attorney, kept saying, “No, they’re wrong, it’s not a class action.”

AMES: And I must say in the years since the release, no one has ever suggested it wasn’t a class action.

[DEPICTING THE PLAINTIFF’S DEPOSITION]

DEDMAN: There is a scene where Maggie is deposing the plaintiff who is played by Robert David Hall, and in it, she seems troubled that she has to ask him about past accidents and some pre-existing psychological issues that he has related to automobiles. Why is she troubled about that approach?

SHELBY: That that scene was rewritten to death. Every single day for five years, we rewrote that scene.

AMES: A fair amount of that deposition came to us from David Hall who was a friend of mine prior to the filming and when I got David scenes to do the part and David talked about the two-day deposition that he had had where the attorneys for, I think it was Volkswagen in that case, had grilled him over and over asking him the same questions over and over just slightly rephrased and how agonizing it had been for him. I thought always with Maggie was that there was a bit of her wanting to have her cake and eat it, too. That she wanted to be a powerful corporate lawyer, but she wanted to be a partner, but that she had perhaps too many moral qualms about what you had to do to people. There’s a scene just subsequent to that in a bar where she identifies herself as a professional killer. That’s how she saw herself behaving in there [at the deposition], and frankly, the scene that she played just before that with [the character of] Quinn, the main partner in the firm, who said, “I want him eliminated as a viable witness in this case,” she was not so much deposing him as she was destroying him.

SHELBY: . . . [W]e needed to see her be hard and be the good soldier and do what she needed to do. But we also, as the audience, we needed to have her do it in such a way that we wouldn’t hate her. We just would not hate her for the rest of the movie. And that is a balancing act that’s very difficult to write.

[FILMS ABOUT PRODUCTS LIABILITY]

DEDMAN: [T]here have been a number of films since Class Action was released that address this sort of products liability complex litigation class action context. What is it about those types of lawsuits that make them a good backdrop for films?

CORT: It’s always a greedy, irresponsible, immoral force against people who can’t really defend themselves and somebody standing up to them. That’s been at the heart of movies since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington back in the thirties. There’s been this kind of war in America so to speak between the enormous kind of secret respect we give to people who travel and become famous and rich and powerful and this hatred we have for people who trample our rights and the rights of the defenseless. So, I think thematically this has been a part of our society and hence been a part of movies ever since. You don’t see that much of it in major Hollywood movies any more because I think the sense in Hollywood is that the courtroom drama has been completely taken over by television and they just don’t want to do it. . . . But it’s not a staple of Hollywood film any more because Hollywood film is so dominantly about the created world and fantasy worlds that are aimed at sort of all ages audiences and most importantly are aimed overseas. And one of the problems with doing courtroom drama or doing a class action lawsuit like this is that it doesn’t travel well because the laws of other countries are different, the things that are crimes here and not necessarily crimes abroad . . . . So, I think the foreign or the international demands of the business mitigate against anything other than the guy who kills somebody is wronged kind of thing. So I think class action kinds of stuff is, or products liability are becoming more difficult to make work.

[THE PRESIDENTIAL CONNECTION]

DEDMAN: Two of the actors in your film went on the play Presidents of the United States. Donald Moffat in Clear and Present Danger and Gene Hackman in Absolute Power and Welcome to Mooseport and then Fred Thompson [who played a corporate representative in Class Action] actually ran for President. Is that a coincidence?

CORT: If I’m not mistaken, Donald Moffat also played LBJ in a movie.

DEDMAN: That was before Class Action. Is there a presidential coincidence there?

AMES: I’ll answer that question with a line from a review that I read shortly after the movie came out, where a reviewer was pontificating about the movie and actually liked it, but said “Can it be a coincidence that Maggie’s father’s first name is the same as the first name of the second in command in Citizen Kane?” And I read it and out loud I said, “Yes, it can be.”

[LAWYERS AND QUALITY OF LIFE]

DEDMAN: One thing that is always on the forefront of discussions in lawyer magazines and publications is the quality of life issue and how lawyers who are traditionally workaholics can achieve some type of balance between the work they need to do and their obligations to their family. What do you think that the movie says about those issues in light of the strained the relationship between Jed and Maggie?

AMES: If given his choice, Jed would always be working. Jed is a classic workaholic ,and Maggie has inherited that. I also think that the lack attention that Jed and probably Maggie to paid to their familial relationship growing up was something that was bound to bear fruit later on down the line and also put the mother in the position of being the arbiter between these two.

SHELBY: There’s no question that workaholism has worked a great deal on Maggie and Jed and really, I think, many achievers in our country, I don’t know any great thing to say about it except it’s just reality. And I think it’s worse now for attorneys than ever with the decline in opportunities for employment. I would not want to be an attorney. Of, course being a screenwriter wasn’t that far off.

[DEFENSE FIRM AS GOOD GUY IN A FILM?]

DEDMAN: You mentioned that part of the appeal for some of the movies that have been released over the years depicting these types of lawsuits is the David versus Goliath angle – the powerless taking on powerful interests. Do you ever think there will be a film, or is there a way to tell a story, where the large corporate interest isn’t necessarily the bad guy in the lawsuit?

SHELBY: Well, definitely. Good drama is the gray part where you can be ambivalent about who is the good guy and who is the bad.

CORT: I’m not sure where the story is when Goliath beats David. So I don’t know, I’m not, I don’t quite see that.

AMES: What we have here, Jim, is the perfect differentiation between a producer and a writer.

AMES: I think the writer is saying, “Now, wait a minute, this could be interesting. Let’s make this dog dance.”

DEDMAN: Well, is it just that the stakes are not as high if the big company . . .

CORT: You’re suing them and you falsified your claim to make them look bad, I guess. But I don’t really see that. . . . I don’t know what I’m watching there or what I’m supposed to feel. You know, there’s again, I think “The Good Wife” does a lot of ambivalent stuff.

SHELBY: There’s always a bigger firm that is more corrupt, you know?

AMES: There’s the movie: A firm that thinks of itself as being completely corrupt and then comes up against somebody who’s more corrupt.

CORT: Yeah, but then it’s like a pox on everybody . . . Who cares?

[SHELBY, AMES, AND DEF LEPPARD]

DEDMAN: I have to ask [Chris and Carolyn] about “Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story.” How did you get involved in that and how did you prepare to write that script?

. . .

AMES: [Our agent] said “I have this strange news for you.” She said “I’ve put you up for all kinds of projects which you would have been absolutely perfect for and you haven’t gotten them. As a group, I put you up for this and they jumped through hoops to get you.”

SHELBY: We had done a movie that was a TV movie that had not been made on, was it Marge Schott or was it – we had become kind of pigeon-holed in doing autobiographical stories or real stories about people and doing them in a way that, generally, most of the people were proved despicable but we did them giving them the benefit of doubt and depicting their background so that people could understand how the Marge Schotts of the world could happen and characters like that. And so they had read Marge Schott and they had read a project for Proctor & Gamble and they loved that we were able to take [on a] very complex context. We also did a thing on the Olympics bid in Utah and how it was achieved . . . . And they loved how we were able to take very big concepts and compress them into something with a story like that we could do in an economic amount of time. But we were so wrong on every other level . . . we were just too old and you wouldn’t think of us to write this and I had a classical music background. . . . I think one of the things that they did like about us was that we weren’t huge Def Leppard fans . . . . We were going to ask the hard questions and we were going to do our best to make it a compelling story without making it too syrupy.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, through her agent, declined a request for an interview. Samantha Shad, one of the writers, also declined our request for an interview.]

JAMES: My wife and I were having dinner with some friends and the subject turned to Superman’s X-ray vision and whether privacy rights on Krypton might be very different. One of our friends suggested that this kind of thing might make for a good blog, which I was a bit skeptical of at first. I thought about it for a few days and wrote up the first few articles, then I posted about the blog on the personal projects section of MetaFilter, a kind of shared blog that Ryan and I are members of. I’ve been a member of MetaFilter since 2005, and it’s a fairly close community with a strong emphasis on member contributions. So I think what really prompted me to start the blog was a desire to contribute something interesting to that community, although I had no idea it would be so well received.

After the post to MetaFilter, Ryan immediately responded with an offer of collaboration, and so he was involved almost from the very beginning. We’ve both been pleasantly surprised by the positive reception the blog has received every step of the way.

JAMES AND RYAN: Relatively few comic books depict the legal process beyond villains being arrested by police after the superheroes do their thing. But what depictions there are hold up pretty well, especially considering most (if not all) comics are written by non-lawyers. The stories that have courtroom scenes usually don’t have any glaring technical errors, even if they don’t show a lot of detail. On the whole, most modern comic book courtroom scenes are on par with the depiction of court scenes in TV shows and movies.

That being said, comic book stories containing plot elements that are significantly legally problematic show up with some regularity, e.g. nobody ever seems to pay taxes or get audited. Some of that is excusable given the common genre trope of not showing boring details—no one ever seems to go to the bathroom either—and warrantless searches and arrests are so commonplace in comic books that it would be kind of surprising if they *didn’t* show up.

But we do occasionally see things that simply don’t work. For example, the criminal law definition of “insanity” isn’t represented in comic books very well. The Joker may be emotionally unbalanced, even to the point of meriting involuntary commitment, but he does not appear to be insane in a way that would excuse him from criminal liability. Similarly, maintaining a secret identity without government support is reasonably difficult even over the short term, and the problems get even worse for abnormally long-lived characters like Wolverine or R’as al Ghul. But again, the few times that comic books do explicitly deal with legal situations, they do fairly well.

JAMES: In one of the Manhunter comics, Manhunter’s alter ego, Kate Spencer, who is a criminal defense attorney, is at a grand jury hearing. The comic book mentions that the proceedings are sealed and that as a representative for the defense Kate is only there as a courtesy and can’t object to anything. I was very pleasantly surprised by the mention of those technical but important details. So that stands out in my mind.

RYAN: I find that the very early Iron Man comics (i.e. the mid-1960s), Tony Stark actually ran into significant difficulties switching between the Iron Man and Stark personae. It’s one of the few times that a superhero seems to have been bothered by the masquerade beyond mere fear of discovery; Stark started to have money problems. It’s one of the reasons he took off the mask, as it were: maintaining the double life was simply too difficult given the highly public life of Tony Stark.

JAMES: My favorite issues have been the ones closest to my day job, which is focused on intellectual property. Posts like “Batman and Patents” and the “Superpowered Merchandising” series are my favorites. I did really enjoy writing the recent post on legal ethics, though, since I don’t think the writer realized that the character was committing an ethical breach (improper in-person solicitation), and I don’t think many readers would realize it either. I enjoyed the opportunity to inform people about the ethical standards for attorneys, especially since this is an issue that they might encounter in their own lives.

RYAN: I’ve enjoyed the more historical topics, so outlawry, the non-human intelligence series, and the posts touching on immortality have been especially fun to write.

Today, Abnormal Use continues its series, “Abnormal Interviews,” in which this site will conduct interviews with law professors, practitioners, and other commentators in the field. For the latest installment, we turn to New York University law professor Catherine Sharkey, who has dedicated a great amount of study to federal preemption. With the U.S. Supreme Court recent preemption jurisprudence, we thought the best person to interview was Professor Sharkey, who was kind enough to give us her thoughts on those new cases. The interview, beginning with a preliminary summary of the opinions authored by Professor Sharkey, is as follows:

The last full week of February was a big week for federal preemption at the U.S. Supreme Court. On Tuesday of that week, the Court handed down Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, a 6-2 pro-preemption decision holding that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act preempts all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers brought by plaintiffs seeking compensation for injury or death caused by vaccine side effects. And the next day, on Wednesday, the Court followed with Williamson v. Mazda Motor of America, Inc., an 8-0 anti-preemption decision holding that the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208, which gave manufacturers a choice of installing either lap belts or lap-and-shoulder belts on rear inner seats of passenger vehicles, do not preempt state tort lawsuits premised on the manufacturer’s failure to install lap-and-shoulder belts.

1. Were the results in these cases a surprise to you?

No, I predicted both the pro-preemption result in Bruesewitz and the anti-preemption result in Williamson. This Supreme Court tends to interpret express preemption provisions, such as the one at issue in Bruesewitz, broadly, whereas the Court has narrowed the scope of implied preemption, as was at issue in Williamson. However, the Court’s 8-0 line-up in Williamson came as a complete surprise. Not only do the Court’s implied preemption cases tend to be hotly contested (such as the 6-3 decision in 2009 in Wyeth v. Levine, the case holding that FDA approval of a pharmaceutical drug did not preempt state tort lawsuits), but Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Alito (dissenters in the Levine case) had signaled their embrace of a broad interpretation of implied preemption, at least in highly regulated areas such as pharmaceuticals (and by extension, automobiles). One might have reasonably predicted these three to have dissented in Williamson. (In hindsight, a key difference may be the presence of an express savings clause in the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which is absent in the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act).

2. In a previous 2000 case, Geier v. American Honda Motor Co., the Court held that the very same statute and federal regulation at issue in Williamson did preempt a state tort lawsuit that would effectively remove a manufacturer option, in that case airbags as opposed to other passive restraints. Can Williamson be reconciled with Geier?

Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinions in both Geier and Williamson (although Geier divided the Court 5 to 4). There are some striking similarities between the two cases. First, the same statute and federal regulation were at issue. Second, the federal regulation provided manufacturers with options in each case: the choice to install airbags or other restraints in Geier; the choice to install a lap or lap-and-shoulder belt in Williamson. And, in each, plaintiffs brought a state tort lawsuit premised on the manufacturer’s failure to install a particular option: airbags in Geier and lap-and-shoulder belt in Williamson. Justice Breyer in fact conceded “the history of the regulation before us [in Williamson] resembles the history or airbags to some degree.” So, what was different? According to Justice Breyer, “unlike Geier, we do not believe here that choice is a significant regulatory objective.” He based this conclusion on “the agency’s contemporaneous explanation, and its consistently held interpretive views.” The majority, in other words, interrogated the reasons behind the agency action to probe whether providing manufacturers with options was a “significant regulatory objective.”

Justice Thomas, however, was not convinced. Not mincing words, he charged: “That the Court in Geier reached an opposite conclusion reveals the utterly unconstrained nature of purposes-and-objectives pre–emption.”

3. Going forward, how might courts discern whether a particular federal regulation embodies a “significant regulatory objective” that conflicts with a state tort lawsuit?

Following Williamson, courts will closely examine the federal regulation, including its history, the promulgating agency’s contemporaneous explanation of its objectives, and the agency’s current views of the regulation’s preemptive effect.

Here, again, Justice Thomas was highly skeptical. He dismisses the majority’s approach as resting, at its core, on some form of “‘psychoanalysis’ of the regulators.” And he notes with chagrin that courts must henceforth “sift[] through the Federal Register, examin[e] agency ruminations, and ask[] the Government what it currently thinks.”

4. What about the presumption against preemption?

Surprisingly, the presumption was never discussed in Williamson and it surfaced only in a single footnote of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Bruesewitz, more as an aside. The presumption hardly lives up to its reputation as a pillar of the Court’s preemption framework. To my mind, all along, the presumption has been deployed by the Court in a haphazard way—rearing its head in some cases, while remaining utterly silent in others (including the majority in Geier, as pointed out with vitriol by the dissent). While many scholars continue to see it as the linchpin of an analytic preemption framework, I have long argued that it rests on extremely weak empirical and theoretical foundations.

5. In light of all of the new opinions, what is the analytic framework for preemption decisionmaking?

The role played by the underlying regulatory agency has been underappreciated in preemption cases. Even in Bruesewitz, an express preemption case authored by Justice Scalia, the most loyal adherent to textualist statutory interpretation, the majority nonetheless looks to the regulatory framework for vaccines for additional support for its holding that the Vaccine Act preempts design defect claims. The majority points to the role of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in prompting the development of improved vaccine design and post-approval monitoring by various federal agencies. Justice Breyer, who places even more weight on the views of HHS (as expressed through the government’s amicus brief), was convinced that the “rigorous administrative safety review” of vaccines and HHS’s thorough understanding of vaccine production and safety was sufficient to read the Vaccine Act as preempting state tort design defect claims.

Williamson brings this approach front and center, with its emphasis on the regulating agency’s views both at the time the regulation is promulgated and at the time the case is before the Court. The majority reiterated its statement in Geier that “the agency’s own views should make a difference.” But, at the same time, the Court does not simply defer to the agency’s obiter dictum. For example, “the fact that DOT [Department of Transportation] made a negative judgment about cost effectiveness . . . cannot by itself show that DOT sought to forbid common-law tort suits in which a judge or jury might reach a different conclusion.” More would be needed form the rulemaking record to substantiate the agency’s intent to preempt. The agency’s views, moreover, will be deemed worthy of consideration only to the extent that they are “consistently held interpretive views.”

In my own work, I have proposed an “agency reference model” to guide judicial preemption decisions. Williamson is a significant step in this direction. And it is particularly momentous in that seven Justices seem to have signed on to this approach. (Again, Justice Thomas notes his strong objection to what he views as “[t]he Court wad[ing] into a sea of agency musings and Government litigating positions and fish[ing] for what the agency may have been thinking 20 years ago when it drafted the relevant provision.”) But more is needed to guard against agency political flip-flop with each Administration’s change of view on implied preemption and state tort law. The next step is to articulate the level of deference to accord to agency positions on preemption and to specify the heightened judicial scrutiny of the agency’s regulatory record that supports its position.

BIOGRAPHY: Catherine Sharkey is Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. She is one of the nation’s leading authorities on federal preemption in the realm of products liability. Professor Sharkey has published more than twenty-five law review articles, essays, reviews, and book chapters in the fields of preemption, punitive damages, administrative law, mass torts, class actions, and empirical legal studies. Her scholarship has been cited by numerous federal appellate and trial courts. Professor Sharkey will join Professor Richard Epstein as co-author of one of the leading torts casebooks and is co-editor with Professor Saul Levmore of the second edition of Foundations of Tort Law. She also serves as a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States. Professor Sharkey earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, summa cum laude, from Yale University. A Rhodes Scholar, she received a master of science in economics for development, with distinction, from Oxford University (Magdalen College), and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Believe it or not, we here at Abnormal Use scored an interview with Hollywood writer and producer Michael Sardo (pictured above), whose new show “Fairly Legal,” debuts Thursday night on the USA Network at 10/9 Central. The show stars Sarah Shahi (pictured below) as Kate Reed, a lawyer turned mediator, whose spirited idealism pits her against the staid conventions of life at her late father’s San Francisco law firm. So weary of the legal profession is she that she actually resigned from the bar. However, she has decided to remain a mediator at the firm and work alongside Lauren Reed (Virginia Williams) who, in addition to being the firm’s by-the-book managing partner, is also Kate’s father’s young widow. Further complicating Kate’s life is her relationship with her ex-husband, Justin Patrick (Michael Trucco), an assistant district attorney who somehow finds himself embroiled in many of Kate’s many mediation antics.

Sardo was kind enough to grant us an interview earlier this month about the show and his philosophy on alternative dispute resolution in general.

DEDMAN: You’ve referred to “Fairly Legal” as “our little anti-law law show,” and I wanted to ask you first, how is it different from other legal shows?

SARDO: Well, it’s different in several ways. It doesn’t take place in the courts. One of the most important scenes in the pilot is Kate being thrown out of a court. She’s the thing that doesn’t belong. Kate Reed, the lead character, is a former lawyer who was frustrated with the law and who resigned from the bar and becomes a mediator. She tries to find a more direct way to solve conflict. Kate’s point of view is that the artifice of the law is this sort of standardization that’s needed to create laws that fit all levels of society [that] actually leaves out some of the most important parts, and she wanted to get to those most important parts. At the same time, in the pilot, she realizes that you often need lawyers and the law because if everyone was a mediator, that way lies anarchy. But as the balance has shifted to us being such a litigious, law-filled society, she is someone who moves towards the opening up of another way for some conflicts to be resolved.

DEDMAN: Now, if I were a client of the Reed & Reed law firm, why would I want Kate Reed to mediate my dispute?

SARDO: Because she would understand the cost, both physical and mental, of going to court, what you could possibly win, but also what it would cost you, and what you could possibly lose, and so she would first propose a more direct streamlined solution which involves hearing what you think, and what the injured party or the complaining party thinks, would be the solution. . . . [N]owhere does the show say we don’t need laws or lawyers. . . . [S]ay you go into a courtroom, [and] I have a disagreement with Jim Dedman, who’s my neighbor – so instead of talking to him, I go to court. . . . . I don’t talk to anyone. My lawyer talks for me. His lawyer talks for him. And then, a judge, who’s sort of dad or grandpa, tells us what’s going to happen. He doesn’t tell you what’s right or wrong but what the law says is right or wrong. So we kind of give up our rights and our adulthood and sublimate it to these laws, some of which may work, and some of which may not. It’s a system that functions well in some cases and really poorly in others. Kate is someone who takes a more direct approach and . . . puts [people] in a mediation where they get to talk for themselves and propose their own solution.

DEDMAN: You mentioned at the beginning that she is a former lawyer, and at some point in the events prior to the pilot, she surrenders her law license as an attorney to become a mediator. Why does she take that approach?

SARDO: A lot of lawyers who are also mediators . . . [they’re] still a lawyer. [They] can still then also hold what’s happened in a mediation confidential, and then be engaged as the person’s lawyer, and Kate wanted to make a clean break from being a lawyer. But she was still interested in the pursuit of justice and truth. . . . Kate is someone who would cut things off if she didn’t like the way they were going. This is the beginning of her becoming an adult in the sense of saying, “I don’t like some of that, but I do like some of it, and I’m going to stay, I’m going to work at my father’s law firm, but I’m not going to do it the way he does it, and the people around me do it. I’m going to make it my own.” For me, as a writer, what appealed to me about that character was the idea of you taking two people in conflict, you put them in a room, you close the door and you send in someone like Kate – to me that’s inherently interesting drama without any of the other artifice surrounding it I think you’ve got to peel away to get through the drama.

DEDMAN: Some of the promotional materials describe Kate as a “recovering attorney,” and in the pilot, she says that she has “more than a small amount of self-hatred,” and I wanted to ask you if those are connected in any way.

SARDO: [Laughs.] Well, like any of us you know, our work life and personal life are connected. Kate is really well aware of her flaws, and she is someone who can act impulsively, and often will do something that makes whatever she’s dealing with, whether it’s personal or professional, worse, because she acts in the moment, and that’s where the “no small amount of self hatred” comes from. “Recovering attorney” is a line I actually heard from more than one mediator who I talked to who said that’s how they referred to themselves as “recovering attorneys,” and I just thought it was great and was always looking for a way to work it in.

DEDMAN: You once gave an interview a while back in which you said that “the writer’s job is to have a point of view,” and I wanted to ask you, what is the point of view you’re expressing in telling stories about mediation, which is something that is not often depicted on television?

SARDO: My point of view is that anything that’s important to you, you should be as personally involved as possible, and you should let your point of view be known, and you should have part of the solution. Whether you caused the problem, or you’re affected by the problem. And that the less you turn it over to someone else, the better. And in my own experience, just in life, the further things get removed from having some kind of personal contact, [the worse they become.] . . . [Y]ou used to go and get your mortgage from your local banker, and he sized you up, and said, “Can this guy pay this for 30 years?” So what happens when they would bundle this part of 10,000 mortgages? There’s no accountability on either end to what happens in court. They sort of give themselves over to a system, and you hire someone with a knowledge of that system to work it to your advantage. . . . [T]he more that people can get involved themselves and take charge of [and] make their own statement about what they want and need and let that be known and try to work it out, [the better.] It’s still not a perfect system, but [it’s] a better system.

DEDMAN: Now, Kate is an idealist and appears unappreciative of the day-to-day operations of her law firm. Why does she still work for that firm?

SARDO: She gives a speech at the end of the pilot where she acknowledges for the first time out loud what is the advantage of the law and the law firm that you do need both things. To go back to your earlier question, what bothered Kate about the law was that every lawyer that I know has had cases that bothered them. But they had to accept that that’s how the law works. [They] knew that somewhere down the line someone was going to change that or that [there] was a wrongful conviction but the person will eventually get out. It’s that kind of ancillary damage that you have to accept to be a good lawyer, I think. It’s a thing that Kate couldn’t accept. But she knows that you need laws in a society. It’s the situational part of it that she couldn’t look away from – the way laws apply differently to different economic classes and different people have different degrees of lawyers. She couldn’t participate in that system any more, but she wanted to be part of the figuring out of truth and justice part of the system.

DEDMAN: One character that was particularly interesting to me as a lawyer was Lauren, who’s played by Virginia Williams, who is the managing partner of the firm and the foil to Kate. How do you think viewers, or lawyer viewers in particular, will respond to that character?

SARDO: . . . [W]hat I hope, and what Virginia and I have both worked really hard on, is to create a character who is – in the hands of a less gifted actress – would be easily parodied. She seems on the surface to be a trophy wife and kind of a bitch, and I think Virginia has found a way to play Lauren the way it was intended: to be neither of those. She actually had a true love with Kate’s dad, and that’s what bothers Kate, even on the surface. Yes, she’s thirty years younger, and she’s beautiful, but she’s quite a good lawyer, and she’s quite smart, and Lauren and Kate both want similar things. But they’re looking at the world through different facets on the prism. Lauren believes the world works best when the trains run on time, and she’s the person to run them. And she looks at the firm and says, “You know what, Kate, I’m watching out for the clients who are paying us, that’s why you have a job and your assistant has a desk and health benefits, and the lights are on. There is good in what I do, not just that it keeps the building running, but that I’m enforcing the law.” She believes in it, and she believes in the rightness of it, and doesn’t believe that it’s her job to change that. Kate questions everything, and between those two poles, I think they represent the two poles of how you can feel about the law, and I don’t think that it’s a healthy system that functions with just one or the other. I think you need both.

DEDMAN: One interesting thing is that both Kate and Lauren have roles that have traditionally been held by men in the past, both in the legal profession and in television depictions of the legal profession. Will the series explore the challenges that are unique to female mediators and female managing partners in the law?

SARDO: Yes, very much so. You see it in one scene in the pilot in what Lauren faces. . . . [Y]ou see how she has to deal with a very important client of the firm and make a decision as to which way she’s going to take that. Kate will deal with some of those issues, also, because, it’s funny, when you have a lead as attractive as Sarah Shahi, and you want to portray her as very serious about her work, but at the same time, you can’t be oblivious to the fact that she’s gorgeous. So, we made a conscious decision to have characters react to that and react to her as a beautiful woman because she is one. If she was a handsome man, people would react in a certain way, so she will have people react to how she looks. . . . Lauren particularly will have to confront those things in her position because of her visibility as managing partner and the fact that she often has to play hardball within the firm and with other people who are interested in the firm.

DEDMAN: One thing that Kate does in the pilot is show up at the front door of a client’s home and encourage him to do “the right thing.” What happens when her definition of “the right thing” conflicts with her firm’s duty to represent that client who might not want to do “the right thing”?

SARDO: That is the conflict that exists between Lauren and Kate, and I was very interested in that because I think that’s the conflict all of us face in all of our jobs. I think if you’re working at an auto repair place [then] you know that you’re being pushed to find everything that can be fixed because you want a higher bill. Every time I go into Starbucks they say, “Would you like something to eat with that?” [Laughs.] Everyone is trying to increase their billings, and they’ll say it to you whether you’re on a diet or 100 pounds overweight or not interested in a snack. So Kate and Lauren, I think that’s something that in all our professional lives we have to grapple with. . . . Kate had to acknowledge the reality that you have to be conscious of the client, and Lauren is not someone who’s without morals. She will also have to deal with the moral complications of making decisions that are better for the business but worse for overall justice in the world.

DEDMAN: Have you gotten any feedback from practicing mediators about the show?

SARDO: Not yet, but it’s starting to come. I’m going to be talking with some soon. I talked to mediators as I was developing the show about their motivations to become a mediator. A lot of them had been lawyers. And about what are the boundaries of what a mediator can do, and what interested me was how much they all repeated the same thing, which was it’s completely about the personality of the mediator. . . . We’ve tried very hard to stay with some degree of realism of what a mediator could do. Of course, the most colorful, interesting, fun mediator. I think people are starting to see the pilot so I will be hearing from our mediator friends.

DEDMAN: You’ve gotten some good supporting cast members and some guests. I noticed you have Gerald McRaney and Esai Morales and John Ashton and Chris Ellis in the two episodes that I saw. Is there anyone else that we can expect to see in the first couple of episodes?

SARDO: Richard Dean Anderson comes back a couple of times. Gerald McRaney will be on a few. and he’s wonderful. Wonderful to have. Ken Howard is in the pilot. We have – I’m trying to think of anyone else that you would really know. Paul Shultze from “Nurse Jackie” does a great turn for us. He plays Eddie the pharmacist on “Nurse Jackie.” I think those are the ones you would know, I’m sure I’m leaving someone else out and hoping they don’t read Abnormal Use.

DEDMAN: I do have to ask you about the “Battlestar Galactica” connection. Michael Trucco plays the assistant district attorney, Justin Patrick, and Esai Morales plays his boss, the district attorney. Trucco was on “Battlestar Galactica” and Morales was recently on [the “Battlestar Galactica” prequel] “Caprica.” Is that a coincidence in the DA’s office on the show there?

SARDO: [Laughs.] I like that you’re looking deeper than we had time to think when we were casting. We were just looking for the best actors we could find, and the good actors work a lot, and they just happen to be in close proximity to each other, but it was not by design. Some of “Battlestar Caprica” people may want to believe it is.

DEDMAN: . . . [M]y last question to you would be is generally, what do you believe is the chief advantage of mediation as opposed to litigation?

SARDO: Quicker. Cheaper. More satisfying. And more in control of your own destiny.

Incidentally, the quotation we reference in our fifth question to Sardo comes from a 1991 interview he gave to Media Week as a 31-year old writer and recent Emmy nominee. The relevant portion of that interview is as follows:

“One of the biggest problems of TV is that show creators write what they can sell and not what they want to watch. I just write what interests me,” says Michael Sardo, 31, who earned an Emmy nomination for his writing for the “The Tracy Ullman Show” before landing a development deal at Lorimar Television to create half-hour comedies for the networks.

“Most of my ideas don’t sell, because they are not recognizable television,” he says. “In my work, the characters have problems that actual people may have. People keep trying to write things that are already on. Why? You’ve already got one. The writer’s job to me is to have a point of view.”

The same obligation should extend to the networks. “There’s a tendency to homogenize – – to appeal to every kind of audience. Always go for the most intelligent way. Executives seem to talk about this fictional audience that’s moronic. Networks should try to come up with what they see are good shows and not what they think people want to watch.”

Sardo came to Hollywood in 1982 via a blue-collar Bronx childhood and Ivy League education to pay his writing dues. At one point, he even lived out of his car. A spec comedy sketch finally landed on NBC followed by two specials for MTV and the Disney Channel before Sardo wound up on the Tracy Ullman staff.

While he credits shows like Northern Exposure, L.A. Law, and Murphy Brown as exceptions, more often, he says, writers and networks try to go for the quick buck by succumbing to safe story structures, then get to used to the money or typecast as formula writers.

“That’s why you also see such unlikely pairings in sitcoms,” says Sardo. “‘She’s a Jew, he’s a Nazi.’ Come on, would they really be together?”

Karlin, Sue. “The New Producers,” Media Week, October 14, 1991.