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Law Blog Last-Minute Gift Idea: Fictionalized Law Students on DVD!

By Ashby Jones

It’s a bit of a rite of passage, isn’t it, to read Scott Turow’sOne-L and watch the movie “Paper Chase” either before or during one’s 1L year.*

But how many of you have seen the television show “Paper Chase,” or, for that matter, even knew such a show existed? We didn’t. But lucky for us — and all LBers far and wide — the second (and final) season of the show was released on DVD last week. A perfect stocking-stuffer, you say? We couldn’t agree more, especially when paired with the first season, which came out in April.

But Law Blog, many of you might be saying, just yesterday, you very astutely told us that the ’00s were the best ever for television. Why would we want to go back to 1983 to watch a show about law school in the 1970s?

Because, well, it sounds like a little hidden gem of a show. Consider this recent review, from a Web site called DVD Talk:

I hadn’t seen The Paper Chase since the mid-1980s, but looking at these episodes again I was surprised at just how well they hold up compared to other equally fine but now dated dramas from the same period, and how well I remembered the shows I hadn’t seen in nearly a quarter-century, so strong an impression did they make.

The writing and the two leading performances make The Paper Chase the great success that it is. [Paper Chase author John Jay] Osborn himself wrote more than a third of the season’s 19 hour-long episodes; those written by others are for the most part just as good, with the season’s best-remembered episode, “Not Prince Hamlet,” penned by Lee Kalcheim. That show, a variation of Rashomon, is a flashbacks story about a father trying to understand why his law student son committed suicide.

The movie and subsequent series made a star out of [John] Houseman (pictured), primarily a stage and film producer before 1973. His measured and erudite delivery, with a hint of perpetual mild impatience in which he seemed to emphasize every fifth word or so, became famous in a series of TV commercials (”Smith Barney earns money the old-fashioned way: they earn it.”) As Kingsfield, Houseman’s ability to intimidate almost reaches through the TV screen to throttle the viewer.

Even more John Houseman as contracts professor Charles Kingsfield? An episode that channels Kurosawa? Come on, folks. We’re sure you’re busy trying to get those billables up for the end of the year, but wethinks you can take time out to give these DVDs a spin.

* During our One-L year, we found watching the original movie, “The Paper Chase,” to be alternatively hilariously fun and unsettling, given the rather brutal emotional struggles suffered by several characters. We also remember noticing how scrawny the actors seem. They’d never let men appear shirtless these days without first subjecting them to six months with a personal trainer and a nutritionist.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 22, 2009 (boomark / email).