Legal Reality TV: Too Boring to Broadcast
Legal TV, a two-year-old station in the U.K., is finding the job of programming for attorneys tough going.
The station has recently cancelled two “legal reality” programs. The first, which involved sending a camera crew with a lawyer to film his or her daily work, was too boring to broadcast, reports Bloomberg. The second, which put 10 actual lawyers in a luxury setting and asked them to fix fictional world disasters, seemingly had more promise.
But the actual program was “like watching paint dry,” according to the news agency. In one episode, in which the attorneys were supposed to plan a rescue of victims trapped in a London flood, the legal eagles focused on fighting among themselves about extraneous issues rather than planning the rescue, according to Davy Bal, a station spokesman who himself was formerly a solicitor. “They were happy to let London drown, it seemed.”
Graham Gibbons, a litigator from Birmingham who was praised by producers as one of the few contestants who gave Lawyers Save The World his best efforts, says he believes the program just didn’t have the right group of attorneys. “I know 10 lawyers that if you put them in the room, you might have to edit the swearing out, but they’d solve the problem,” he says.
