Goodnight, John Boy

National Review Online, October 11, 2002

The Pax TV network promises "quality, family-friendly entertainment, free of senseless violence, explicit sex and foul language." That's one good reason for me to avoid it. Just Cause, a new show that premiered a couple of weeks ago, is another. Described by the self-proclaimed "feel good" network as a "compelling legal drama" this dreary offering is, in fact, no more than populist pabulum for the age of Enron. Promoted with the slogan "Cleaning up America…one crooked CEO at a time," Just Cause is a gimcrack morality play tailored for dunces. More ominously, it is almost certainly an early example of how the recent corporate scandals have, once again, turned bashing business into showbiz fare. The show's premiere opens in a women's prison, that familiar location for overheated fantasy, which on this occasion involves not sex (well, this is Pax), but racial harmony, pizza deliveries, benignly butch wardresses and a rendering of "I Will Survive." The occasion is the release of Alex DeMonaco (played by the marvelously named Lisa Lackey), paroled towards the end of a five-year sentence for insurance fraud. Naturally, like many of her fellow inmates, she is a "bona fide member" of the "been done wrong by a man club", a victim, not a criminal. In her case, she has taken the fall for her crooked lawyer of a husband, who has, the brute, disappeared with the loot, taking the couple's young daughter with him. In a final confirmation of this monster's wickedness, we learn that he used to wear a $3,000 suit, while poor Alex had to make do with "pantyhose with holes in them."

Alex, however, did not entirely waste her time in prison. Not only did she find true friendship amongst the salt of the cellblock, but she also managed to complete a law degree. On leaving prison, Alex works as a cleaning woman, but not for long. This very briefest of stints amongst the working poor was probably included only to establish her street credibility — her coworkers are impressed that she's a "home girl" from East L.A., who can speak Spanish. She then manages to talk herself into the offices of Hamilton Whitney III, a tony (we know that because of his name, his number, and the fact that he is the last man in America to wear a three-piece suit) San Francisco lawyer, whose firm's caseload will, after the arrival of Alex, move decidedly downscale.

As Jacqueline Zambrano ("a surfer and a Buddhist," according to a press release), the show's producer and co-creator, has explained, "We kind of feel like we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore… Our stories are going to be about corporate greed, drug companies that don't give us disclosure, the Army [not paying] for Agent Orange veterans, fast-food companies that give us breakouts of [bacteria]," a predictably shrill agenda so narrow-minded that to describe it as one-sided would be a compliment.

None of this seems to worry Hamilton Whitney III. His pleasantly profitable commercial practice (described in Pax's promotional materials as "helping rich people keep their money") will probably be wrecked by the militantly anti-business DeMonaco, but, by the end of the first episode, Alex's crusading zeal has fired up Whitney's old enthusiasm for the legal profession (apparently the practice of corporate law doesn't really count as a truly satisfactory calling) and the ex-con has become a member of his team. Perhaps casting is to blame. Whitney is played by Richard Thomas, an actor who became infamous as "John Boy" Walton, that simpering scion of a sanctimonious clan which, for all its supposedly conservative appeal, always seemed more Roosevelt than Coolidge.

Revealed as a man with a painfully clichéd social conscience, and thus, in all likelihood, a bore, the character of Whitney runs the risk, despite the best efforts of the amiable Mr. Thomas, of being too dull to watch. To spice him up a little, the show's scriptwriters have given this antiseptic attorney a racy past that is more Fox than Pax. Whitney III has three ex-wives! The problem is that, as a Casanova, the erstwhile sage of Walton's Mountain simply does not convince, and nor, for that matter, does Rebecca, the only one of his former spouses to make an appearance so far. Presumably one of the show's promised "comedic undercurrents," she's a curvy FBI agent in a Sue-Ellen Ewing power suit sashaying through her scenes in a way that reminds us yet again that the departure of a far more likeable G-woman, the restrained and classy Dana Scully, was a tragedy for the discerning viewer.

As for the series' storylines, they operate as little more than a showcase for the scriptwriters' ideological posturing. The premiere was, opportunistically but understandably enough, dedicated to financial and other shenanigans in an Enron-like corporation, Coltar, "a Bay-area energy giant." While aspects of the drama (the way in which the document shredder has become the getaway car of early twenty-first century robbery) were bang up to date, many of its characterizations were archaic caricatures, not much fresher than that old cliché of the capitalist bogeyman in his top hat and frock-coat, albeit adapted to the movie of the week sensibilities of contemporary TV.

Thus, while Enron's real-life chieftains seemed to have succeeded in maintaining at least a veneer of sophistication, the Coltar entourage includes a posse of Texan Neanderthals, complete with bolo ties, hee-haw accents, talk of executive jets, and a deplorably sexist attitude towards poor, pawed Alex, who is referred to as "Honey" and, in the ultimate display of crassness, asked to stick her "pretty finger" into the coffee "in order to sweeten it up." It's not only the bad manners that are exaggerated — Coltar's crimes are also far worse than anything now alleged about the home of that infamous crooked E.

Given Enron's current difficulties, it's difficult to become too upset when that company is parodied, even if unfairly. Suspicions, however, that the evil Coltar was being used as a device to make broader comments about the wickedness of corporate America were confirmed in the second episode of Just Cause. This saw the scriptwriters turn their attention to a far-less-deserving target: the pharmaceutical industry, a familiar punching bag for the unthinking Left. The story revolved around a rogue drug company testing its possibly dangerous products on an appropriately helpless community (the patients of a free clinic in an impoverished part of town). That's not an outlandish plot for a TV drama these days, but what marked out this episode was a series of observations by Alex that seemed to suggest that our heroine wants to see the U.S. adopt a Soviet-style medical system or, failing that, revert to the era of the apothecary and the leech.

On asking the clinic's doctor (long-haired, sincere, sympathetic) why a pharmaceutical company should want to manufacture a drug almost identical to one that is already available, Alex is told that the answer is "greed." If a company sees a competitor's product doing well, it will want to "whip up a me-too product and get a little of the action." Alex shakes her head at this disgraceful example of free market competition, mutters angrily about "capitalism at work" and looks sadly across at, you guessed it, some children. Needless to say the principal victim in this episode is also, Rodham-style, a child — of Russian immigrants, no less. Within minutes of his mother telling him about the joys of being brought up in the United States, the land of equality and democracy, the unfortunate tyke has (like, I suspect, most of the Just Cause audience) fallen into a coma. In poor Yuri's case, the grasping capitalists of the American pharmaceutical industry are to blame. Subtle, this show is not.

Other contributions by Ms. DeMonaco to the healthcare debate include misleading statistics hurled into the conversation in a way rather reminiscent of The West Wing and, in a comment on the drug companies' efforts to develop their business, the remark that "pushers aren't just on the street." There are, quite clearly, few depths to which this tawdry piece of agitprop will not sink.

So, Ms. Zambrano says that she is as mad as hell. I don't know about that, but she certainly ought to be embarrassed.