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An entire world full of fans looking forward to a Corbin Bernsen/Jimmy Smits/Harry Hamlin L.A. Law reunion might want to rethink ordering that extra dip and chips for their premiere episode watch party…
According to our Susan Dey fanatics over at The Hollywood Reporter, ABC has opted to scuttle the proposed sequel series to NBC’s Emmy-festooned and long-running (1986-1994) legal drama series L.A. Law which we here at Vents reported on some time back. That sound you hear in the background is the collective moan of an army of deflated Blair Underwood aficionados.
Set to bring back veteran actors Corbin Bernsen and Blair Underwood, the L.A. Law revival series was pitched as an updated take on the original show that would have seen the law offices of McKenzie Brackman reconfigure itself as a litigation firm. The real twist presumably would have been in the type of cases the firm handled in the 21st Century: Only the upper echelon of so-called boundary and button pushing cases would be considered by the reinvented McKenzie Brackman. Considering the absolute exhaustion most viewers feel about real life parallels to this concept (this is, after all, the “age of outrage,” right?), perhaps its best this new iteration of L.A. Law was stopped in its tracks before it became a form of the ill-advised Dexter: New Blood; i.e. attempting to keep the loyal longtime fans while selling out the very things those fans loved about the concept in order to garner a presumably younger, fresher demographic.
So what jettisoned the all-new L.A. Law? Word ‘round industry campfire has it that the series simply did not fit the television zeitgeist of 2022. The concept itself had been given a big green light from the estate of series co-creator Steven Bochco which led to former attorney and comic book scribe Marc Guggenheim (Justice Society of America) to write a crackerjack of a pilot script. As noted above, Bernsen and Underwood had already cleared their respective dance cards for the revival, and former L.A. Law alum Jill Eikenberry was also expected to return to the fray. Other actors cast in the sequel series – and new to the L.A. Law franchise – were Toks Olagundoye, Hari Nef, Ian Duff, Kacey Rohl and Juliana Harkavy.
L.A. Law is but one of a recent spate of proposed revival shows of iconic 80s and 90s TV properties that never got off the ground past pilot stage: Fans of Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s seminal series Thirtysomething have also experienced the pain of the tease of a revival, only to have the Powers That Be (i.e. ABC) get last minute jitters before pulling the trigger on a reunion which would have brought back together such acting stalwarts as Ken Olin, Mel Harris, Timothy Busfield and Patricia Wettig among others.
