'The Deep End,'
not worth jumping in
New ABC legal drama wades in pretty shallow waters
By Tom Conroy
Jan 21, 2010
Some TV pilots line up their main characters like little chess pieces. Then, just in case we can’t figure out which one is a knight and which one is a pawn, they spell out their roles in big labels.
“The Deep End,” a new series premiering tonight on ABC at 8 p.m., starts with its four main characters interviewing for jobs as first-year associates at a big Los Angeles law firm. They summarize themselves neatly, in terms that no moderately intelligent person would use.
The beautiful, blond Beth (Leah Pipes) lets her interviewer know that she is rich and well connected, presumably so that he can conclude she feels entitled to the job. The rakish Liam (Ben Lawson) says, “I believe in the quest for truth, and I want to meet women.”
Those characters are clearly meant to be aspirational for viewers — even though neither one is smart enough to figure out that if you’re going to have sex at work, you should lock your office door.
The two nice characters with whom viewers are meant to identify, puppyish Dylan (Matt Long) and mousy Addy (Tina Majorino) tell the interviewer how nice and identifiable they are.
The new associates will be confronted with moral dilemmas. We know this because two very different partners are fighting for control of the firm: the principled traditionalist Hart (Clancy Brown) and the unprincipled corner-cutter Cliff (Billy Zane).
Whenever it’s unclear that a character is facing an ethical decision, another character is always on hand to spell it out. “A man doesn’t choose the moment,” a senior partner tells one of the rookies. “The moment chooses the man.”
Some of the characters are hard to pigeonhole, but that seems more likely because of bad writing. Cliff’s wife and fellow partner, Susan (Nicole Ari Parker), is clearly too intelligent to have married him. Another partner, Rowdy, is so unprincipled that he may have told Dylan to show up to work 10 days late just to mess with him, but then we learn that he started his career working for little money at a do-gooder nonprofit.
The pilot suggests that Rowdy will waver between the dark side and the light, depending on what is most convenient to the plot.
The writers clearly need some help with plotting. In the pilot, one client withholds some information that is so crucial to her case that the only possible explanation is that she knew the episode needed a big “reveal” scene. Twice in the same episode, two characters meet cute by bumping into each other.
One character's marital infidelity pops up out of nowhere and is inexplicably forgiven, only to set up a big cliff-hanger at the end.
And far too late in the episode, a fifth associate is suddenly, awkwardly introduced (via one of those aforementioned collisions). The likeliest explanation for the hiring of Malcolm (Mehcad Brooks) is that the show’s producers got notes from ABC asking why there were no minorities among the young lawyers.
The awkward writing extends to the dialogue. The pilot includes several double-entendres (e.g., “I really worked hard on that”) that are so weak that Beavis and Butt-head would have let them pass unnoticed. Other lines sound as if they had been recycled from failed previous pilots.
When Hart and Cliff square off in the office, Susan calls it “an unstoppable force and an immovable object in the midst of a mallet-measuring contest.”
The actors do their best with this material, but really, they were the ones who were thrown in the deep end.
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